Did a Group of Young Black Spiritual Seekers Vanish Due to an ‘Online Cult’?

The last time Mikayla Thompson’s aunt, “Ella,” saw her was over the summer. She arrived at Mikayla’s apartment in Berkeley, a suburb of St. Louis, to pick up the younger woman’s toddler daughter, who’d been staying with her some of the time, and caught a glimpse of a heavyset man in the hallway.

“That’s my mom’s boyfriend,” the little girl said. 

Later that summer, Ella—we are referring to her by a pseudonym to protect her privacy—discovered that Mikayla, who is 25 years old, had laid out her daughter’s birth certificate and a few photos, along with several letters. There was a note addressed to her daughter “encouraging her to live her best life, to not let people put her down or boss her around, to be the best she can be,” Ella remembered. 

Mikayla and three other young adults including Naaman Williams, the heavyset man, and Makayla Wickerson, a distant cousin, also 25, vanished, along with two young children. They haven’t been seen since leaving a hotel in Florissant, Missouri in early August, and none of their families have heard from them. Steve Runge, an investigator with the Berkeley Police Department, says he has no leads.

The young people, it’s clear, had become deeply involved in a large, loose online community of young Black spiritual seekers, and exhibited strange behavior including meditating outside in the nude in full sight of neighbors, adopting the names of ancient gods, and cutting themselves off from their families. They were, more specifically, deeply interested in the teachings of influencers including the charismatic Rashad Jamal, a convicted child molester and self-proclaimed divine being who preaches that Black and Latino people are gods, that polygamy is essential to the cultivation of the conscious mind, and whose online followers have, as VICE News has reported, been accused and in some cases convicted of serious crimes, including two bizarre murders in Alabama. One person who knows the young people said in an online conversation viewed by VICE News that they probably went off the grid to prepare to ascend, believing something akin to the Rapture was coming.

Over the past two weeks, the case has drawn considerable attention from local and national media due to these sensational elements. Much of the reporting on the case, though, has drastically overstated what is currently known about the reasons why these people disappeared, as well as presenting a distorted picture of the loose community they appear to be a part of. That network of conscious young Black people, meanwhile, is full of whispers about where the missing people might be.

While a great deal remains unknown, the truth appears to be both stranger and more complicated than portrayed in reports suggesting that the young people could be, as both the Guardian and NBC put it, “in the clutches of an online cult.” Mikayla Thompson, in particular, seems more than anything to have been seeking to escape a troubled past; in the process, she and the young people with whom she joined forces made their way into an uncertain future, falling down an online rabbithole of esoteric beliefs that further alienated them from a society they already felt had spurned and oppressed them.

“Being a Black person in America, we’re unheard,” one of Thompson’s relatives told VICE News, reflecting on her possible state of mind before the disappearance. “We’re shut out. Our opinions and how we feel don’t matter. That may take a part in this also.”  

“QUICK TO ENFORCE THE LAW ON YO BLACK AS” he wrote in January 2022, “THE MOMENT YOU GIVE YO PLASMA ENERGY BACT TO PLANET KI AKA ‘PISSING IN PUBLIC‼️’” 

At around this same time, according to three relatives who spoke at length to VICE News, MIkayla Thompson was undergoing a change that even in retrospect they can’t make sense of. They described an extremely bright young woman who was processing an unsettled upbringing, traumatic experiences, and bad relationships, and had been cycling through periods of homelessness. She was raising her daughter with the help of her aunt, who had also helped raise her, and alternately attempted to heal troubled relationships with people close to her and to shut them out entirely, going so far as to intermittently block her mother on social media platforms. She began to find deep meaning in what one relative called “witchcraft,” including reading tarot cards. For a period of time, she was living in her own apartment and paying her bills with income she made from her readings. Then things changed and became, in the words of one relative, “darker.” 

According to what Williams’ mother told Runge, the investigator, he was a loving son who in 2022 began a “spiritual journey,” with consequent changes. One of the last times they spoke, for instance, he told her that she wasn’t his mother at all, and that she was merely a “shell”—the type of delusional-sounding belief frequently preached by conscious influencers. (Tragically, when “conscious” beliefs shade into seeming delusion, family members have ended up as victims of extreme violence. Damien Washam, a Rashad Jamal fan in Alabama, killed his mother with a sword and gravely injured another family member following an argument over his marijuana use, he told police. Washam had become increasingly immersed in Jamal’s videos in the leadup to the killing, buying thousands of dollars worth of crystals from Jamal’s University of Cosmic Intelligence as well as a Glock and armor-piercing rounds. Washam had no known mental health issues, according to his family, and there is still considerable uncertainty about what motivated him to commit the murder. He was acquitted by reason of insanity last year.) 

While it isn’t clear precisely when, Williams met Thompson online, and in January 2023, she drove across the country to Washington and came back with him—a serious commitment for someone who had not long before been sleeping in her car and was piecing together a living with online spiritual readings.

Thompson never formally introduced her relatives to Williams, or really spoke about him, and her aunt only became aware of his presence in her home when Thompson’s daughter mentioned it. Another relative realized Thompson had a new man in her life when the two started posting videos on Facebook together, talking about esoteric beliefs. To this day, none of them are exactly sure what the nature of the relationship was or is, and none understand what she was doing with Williams, who was heavyset, unemployed, and to their eyes, simply not as smart as Mikayla. The same month she collected Williams from Washington, though, her social-media presence, which had largely been focused on tarot, the zodiac, and positive affirmations, changed. 

In a posting offering an “Energy Update From the Cosmos,” she wrote “I highly advise y'all to start watching Rashad Jamal's live lectures & book a Cosmic Counseling Session with Aramean Robutu," this latter being the online name Williams had adopted and used to sell readings offering clients the opportunity to receive counseling from dead ancestors. She and Williams appeared together in winding Instagram and Facebook videos, talking about esoteric spirituality, and began touting something called the Cosmic War Room, seemingly the name they gave their online broadcasts. She, meanwhile, also sold crystal jewelry similar to that sold by Jamal’s University of Cosmic Intelligence.

During this time, Thompson became close friends with one of her distant cousins, Makyala Wickerson, who is now also missing along with her young daughter. Having gone through periods of silence and disconnection from Thompson, relatives were surprised that Wickerson became close with her, let alone moved in with her and Williams. “She’s always been up in spirit, very happy and goofy,” one relative remembered, referring to Wickerson. “Liked to keep herself up, liked nice things. She stayed around family, very family-oriented. She kept a job.” The only unusual thing they could remember was that in the months before her disappearance, Wickerson had begun talking about God on Facebook much more frequently than usual, and was less and less available when her family tried to contact her. 

Before long, the two women, as well as their young daughters, were living not just with Williams, but with another woman named Gerielle German. According to Runge, in the summer of 2023, German told her husband that she’d seen demons and became highly spiritual. In July, she fled with her two-year-old son from the small town in Mississippi where they lived, with a friend bringing her to Berkeley. (German also has two older children who she appears to have left with her husband.) 

The group drew attention to itself; neighbors reported seeing the group meditating outside, sometimes in the nude. While the exact arrangements among the group are unknown, during this time, Williams shared approving content about polygamy, arguing in nearly impenetrable Instagram captions that—as Jamal also preaches—it is the divine cosmic order. 

“See when you innerstand the Cosmic essence of us you drop all of the PROGRAMED constructs,” he wrote in one post. “It was never about sex it was about divine order And Maximizing creative energy. if one is not deeply rooted in the divine essence of source energy, This will be difficult to incept or injust. Because the most high counsel of nine created it to be this way as a reward for the most high God which they created and put evenly on the throne beyond the cosmic kingdom THAT WHICH WE ARE! because The Gods are to PROVIDE, PROTECT & IN-FORCE. So this is why when Goddesses do it it creates an imbalance in you. This is why the Goddesses out number the Gods.”

The group never exactly went definitively missing; it simply became clear after a time that they were gone. Wickerson’s brother had difficulty getting ahold of her over the summer, and finally went to the house one day in August to find her, knocking on the front door. 

“When he didn’t get an answer he walked the house and noticed the back window in the house was broken out,” a relative told VICE News. “That’s when he went in and looked at the state of the house and was like, ‘This is not my sister.’” 

The house was “a complete mess,” they added. “Makayla didn’t do clutter or mess or anything like that.” 

The last solid lead investigators have is that the group stayed in a hotel in Florissant, about 20 miles away, for four days, listing Thompson’s aunt’s address as their fixed residence. After that, they simply vanished. One acquaintance said in an online coversation viewed by VICE News that they had probably gone “off the grid” and were getting ready for ascension.

“Everyone who is aware is getting prepared,” they wrote.

It isn’t simply the fact that at least two members of the group promoted Jamal’s work and preached ideas similar to his that is leading investigators to look into the connection, though. 

As VICE News has reported in a series of stories about Jamal and his most ardent fans and followers, there is a pattern of young Black people from stable backgrounds and leading quiet lives exhibiting radical changes in behavior and personality after encountering his preaching online, frequently becoming obsessed with the idea of going off the grid and returning to nature.

Mostly, this has been seemingly harmless, as in the case of a group of young seekers who documented the conflicts they ran into with police while carrying out a low-grade crime spree and attempting to connect with nature by sleeping in public parks. The most puzzling aspect of such cases has largely been why young people from conventional backgrounds have become convinced that rainbows are gates to other dimensions, that birds are government-built machines, or that NBA players are synthetic robots.

There are darker aspects to the mystery, though: Three people whose personalities abruptly changed after engaging heavily with Jamal’s content have been connected to murder. In addition to Washam, the young man who was acquitted of killing his mother by reason of insanity, Yasmine Hider and Krystal Diane Pinkins are both serving lengthy prison sentences after Hider shot and killed a college student, Adam Simjee, during a bungled robbery attempt against Simjee and his girlfriend in a state park in Alabama. Pinkins, according to police, watched the confrontation, and fled into the woods, where police said they found a tent encampment and Pinkins’ five-year-old child armed with a rifle. (The child put the gun down and Pinkins and Hider were taken into custody without incident; the USDA Forest Service later disputed that there was an encampment in the woods, a discrepancy that has not been explained.) 

Darshell Smith is the mother of the child who Jamal went to prison for abusing. She told VICE News she’s deeply disturbed by the disappearance of the young people, saying she “tried to warn people” about what she sees as Jamal’s malignant influence. 

“Now he’s affected the whole world,” she added. 

Runge told VICE News that he is investigating the influencers the young people were following online and whether their spiritual beliefs had a role in their disappearance, and is comfortable using the word “cult” to describe the group—though he is clear that he has no evidence or reason to think that this makes Jamal the cult’s leader, or involved directly in any way.

Nevertheless, the idea that the young people were brainwashed at long distance by an internet cult leader seems to have proved irresistible to the media. (“Police continue search for 6 missing people tied to online cult leader who bashed Jesus,” the Christian Post headlined a story about the case.) This erases the more complex dynamics that were going on in their lives, and the way that New Age spirituality both served as a balm for them and, at the same time, deepened the problems they were having with money and earthly authority. 

“She was really into the whole spiritual awakening and crystals and horoscopes and zodiac,” one of Thompson’s relatives told VICE News. “I don’t know if she found something online or it just connected with her.” But, they added, she “went in 100 percent.” 

In response to a request for comment, a person identifying themselves as “Rashad Jamal Publicist” emailed VICE News from Jamal’s email account, saying “Recent accusations regarding his involvement in the disappearance of 6 individuals require a comprehensive discussion to provide context and address any misconceptions.” They did not reply to a follow-up email; a VICE reporter missed a phone call from Jamal’s number. In the past, Jamal has asked for $100,000 for an interview, which he claims—incorrectly—he’s owed under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and has asserted that VICE “will not stop the spiritual progression of this planet.”

Police have said that they believe the young people “don’t want to be found,” but their prolonged silence on social media is extremely concerning to people who understand the conscious community. A livestreamer who covers that community—sometimes critically—and goes by the name Duhkulu, Kulu for short, online has suggested that the missing people could be in a community in Mexico. On Instagram, he offered a small monetary reward for anyone with further information about their whereabouts. 

"That's what worries me about these people," Kulu told VICE News. "They're not posting it online to help inspire other Rashad followers.” Abandoning both their online community and their livelihood is a worrying sign, he said. “We have to find these people.” 

Kulu’s suspicion that the group could be in Mexico comes via information from a young woman whom VICE News is not naming because she is not a public figure. The woman reportedly said in a private message that one of the women living in the Berkeley house had asked her to join their community, and suggested she accompany them to Mexico. Recently, she wrote a post expressing frustration at the way the story had been covered in the press. 

“This story is all fcked up,” she wrote, linking to a news story about the missing group. “And has nothing to do with Rashad Jamal. I knew Mikayla Thompson personally. She always been spiritual. The guy she was dating ‘Naamen’ in all black used Rashad Jamal teachings and added to them.” 

Mikayla grew more distant as she got closer to Namaan, the woman added. “I am a spiritual person but I have enough since to know where I draw the line. And Naamen teachings is where I drew that mf.  Meditation and sungazing is normal. There’s nothing cult about it.” 

Today, as the silence stretches on, one of Mikayla and Makayla’s relatives says they simply hope to hear from the young people, wherever they may be. 

“Anything can be worked out,” the woman says. “We’re not mad, we’re just hurt. We love them dearly and we’ll do whatever we have to do to get them home safely and get them the help they need to recover. To get them home as a family and continue on as we have before.” 

Do you know anything we should know about these missing people or the broader conscious community? Email tim.marchman@vice.com, anna.merlan@vice.com, or call/text on our secure Signal line at (267) 713-9832. If you have information about where the missing people are, Major Steve Runge of the Berkeley, Missouri Police Department’s Homicide and Major Crimes Division can be reached at wrunge@ci.berkeley.mo.us.