Two former members of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries have been awarded $33 million each after they sued Alamo for ordering them to be beaten.
The two men testified that evangelist Tony Alamo ordered his enforcer, John Kolbek, to beat them.
Evangelist Tony Alamo, who is serving a 175-year sentence in federal prison for taking young girls across state lines for sex, faces a civil trial starting Tuesday that he ordered the beating of two of his former ministry members.
The alleged enforcer, John Kolbek, died last January while on the run.
Police say John Kolbeck, a man sought for more than two years on charges he beat disobedient followers of a now-convicted evangelist, has died Thursday in Kentucky op an apparent heart attack, Associated Press reports.
The alleged enforcer of evangelist Tony Alamo must pay $3 million in restitution to two boys he’s believed to have beaten bloody on the preacher’s behalf and left haunted for life, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
The teens have also sued Alamo.
When Tony Alamo was arrested last year, his enforcer — John Erwin Kolbeck — fled and hasn’t been seen since.
The television show America’s Most Wanted is in Fort Smith, Arkansas to take the story to a national level in hopes of finding him.
An attorney said Wednesday that he plans to publish a notice in a newspaper as early as next week giving the man accused of being Tony Alamo‘s “enforcer” 30 days to respond to a lawsuit or risk having a judgment entered against him.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes gave Carter permission to notify Kolbeck of the lawsuit by publishing a notice the Texarkana Gazette.
A judge’s ruling Wednesday gives two teenagers an extra three months to find the man they say beat them while they were members of the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries and serve him with a copy of their lawsuit.
But the teenagers’ attorney, W. David Carter of Texarkana, Texas, said he doesn’t expect to wait that long to move forward with the lawsuit, which seeks damages against the ministry’s leader, Tony Alamo, and John Kolbeck, whom authorities have identified as Alamo’s “enforcer.”
A beating administered by evangelist Tony Alamo and the man described as his “enforcer,” John Kolbeck, at Alamo’s religious compound in Fouke last year caused “serious and permanent injury” to a teenager’s left hand and wrist, according to a lawsuit filed by the teenager and another former church member.
Eighteen-year-old Spencer Ondirsek said in the lawsuit that Alamo struck him three times during the beating. At one point, he said, Alamo taunted him, saying, “You think I like doing this? I love doing this !” The lawsuit was filed by Ondirsek and Seth Calagna, who is also 18, on Tuesday afternoon in U. S. District Court in Texarkana. Both teens left the church this year and now live in the Spokane, Wash., area.
At a hearing on the custody status of two girls removed from Tony Alamo‘s religious compound in southwest Arkansas, a 14-yearold girl testified that Alamo had touched her inappropriately, and an 18-year-old man described beatings at the hands of another church member.
e girls, along with four others, were removed from the compound in Fouke after a Sept. 20 raid by federal and state authorities investigating allegations that children at the compound had been physically and sexually abused.
At a federal detention hearing Wednesday for Tony Alamo, several witnesses said John Erwin Kolbeck beat Alamo’s followers for even minor infractions like playing with a spray bottle. John Wesley Hall Jr., a Little Rock lawyer representing Alamo, declined to comment about the
Former followers said Alamo sometimes introduced Kolbeck by mimicking Jack Nicholson’s menacing “Here’s Johnny!” from “The Shining.”