NEW YORK (NY)
NBC News

February 12, 2021

By Tyler Kingkade, Liz Brown, and Keith Morrison

At a Missouri Christian school for troubled teens, alumni say a gap in state law prevented inspections, enabling abuse to continue for decades.

Colton Schrag remembers the night at the Agapé Boarding School when, he says, a staff member punched him in the face.

It was late on April 20, 2007, he said, and the staff at the all-boys boarding school in southwestern Missouri wanted him to confess that he and two other boys were going to try to run away. After Schrag, then 14, refused to answer their questions, he said, one of the employees knocked him to the ground, and then others held him facedown, pressing a knee into his back and head.

Once they were done, staff members took away Schrag’s clothes and bedding, he said, and made him wear…