A Kansas jury found six former members of a nationwide cult guilty Monday of forced labor and conspiracy to commit forced labor, federal authorities said.
Kaaba Majeed, 50; Yunus Rassoul, 39; James Staton, 62; Randolph Rodney Hadley, 49; Daniel Aubrey Jenkins, 43; and Dana Peach, 60, were each convicted for their roles in enforcing child labor practices by way of physical, emotional and psychological abuse, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Three of the defendants were previously high-ranking members of the United Nation of Islam , while three were wives of the cult’s founder, Royall Jenkins.
The defendants were indicted in 2021 , along with 48-year-old Etenia Kinard and 45-year-old Jacelyn Greenwell, who previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit forced labor. The trial took 26 days, according to the news release.
Along with a large branch in Kansas City, Kansas, The United Nation of Islam operated sects in cities including New York City, Newark, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Atlanta, according to the Department of Justice.
The KCK branch included an unlicensed organization that was billed as a boarding school for children from across the United States, but was actually a forced work program for children ages 8 to 16.
The group, which at one point had hundreds of followers, was founded in the 1970s by Royall Jenkins. Jenkins, a former truck driver, convinced his followers that he was “taken through the galaxy by aliens on a spaceship” and shown the proper way to rule Earth. He moved the group’s headquarters to KCK in the 1990s.
Under the custody of cult members, the young victims worked upwards of 16 hours a day without pay in businesses including restaurants, gas stations, bakeries, laboratories and clothing factories, according to the federal indictment. The six defendants also forced the children to work in their own homes as unpaid cleaners and child care workers.
“The victims all lived in deplorable conditions, in overcrowded facilities often overrun with mold, mice and rats,” the DOJ Office of Public Affairs wrote in a Monday news release. “In contrast, the defendants and their immediate families lived comfortably.”
In order to enforce the illegal labor practices and conditions, the defendants and other UNOI members meted out corporal punishment, including forcing some of the children to undergo colonics, according to the federal indictment. Other forms of punishment included solitary confinement and isolation from the outside world, including restrictions on what victims read, who they spoke to and how much they weighed.
Victims reported being beaten with a paddle, dangled upside down over train tracks, hit with extension cords and forced to consume only lemon juice for days at a time, according to the indictment.
A federal judge in Kansas designated the United Nation of Islam as a cult in 2018. The same year, U.S. Judge Daniel Crabtree ordered $8 million be paid to Kendra Ross, a woman who said she was forced to perform unpaid labor for 10 years as a child in the cult.
The eight defendants, including Greenwell and Kinard, will next appear in a federal district court on Feb. 18 for sentencing. Each could be sentenced to up to 20 years in federal prison.
Previous reporting by The Star’s Bill Lukitsch and Luke Nozicka was used in this article.
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