Not long after paramedics in Colton tried to come to his rescue in 2010, a 4-year-old boy with a winning smile died of septic shock due to a ruptured appendix. Nearly nine years later, a 43-year-old Redlands man named Ruben Moreno was reported missing. And then, in May 2023, Emilio Ghanem, 40, also went missing, last seen at a Starbucks in Redlands. His relatives took notice. So did the police.
Both missing men were members of a religious organization called His Way Spirit Led Assemblies. Though it’s a small and obscure group whose members have lived in multiple locations across the Inland Empire since the early 2000s, authorities recently identified a link between the organization and all three cases — the death of little Timothy Thomas and the disappearances of the two middle-aged men.
The group’s leaders, Darryl Muzic Martin and his wife, Shelly Bailey “Kathryn” Martin, had been the temporary caregivers of the 4-year-old at the time of his death. Authorities have viewed the case with suspicion for 15 years, with a 2010 coroner’s investigation citing a detective’s report as saying the Martins’ church had engaged in “cult-like” activities.
The cases and a series of August raids on locations tied to the group have brought a wave of attention to the secretive church, whose female leader refers to herself as a prophetess. In the raids of compounds in Hemet and Anza, where members are currently believed to live, Redlands police confiscated fully automatic rifles and other illegal weapons and briefly detained a dozen people. That same month, Redlands police detained the group’s leaders at a motel in Laguna Beach.
Everyone has been released, after being held briefly. No charges have been filed. And the group’s leaders — whom The Times could not reach for comment — remain under investigation.
My colleagues Clara Harter and Richard Winton delivered these disturbing details, and many more, in a story late last month. Colton police Sgt. Shawn McFarland told them that his ongoing investigation into the 4-year-old’s death had suggested the same kind of “cult-like” activity the coroner’s investigative report had referred to in 2010. He said the Martins had been “imposing excessive control” on members. The couple got members to hand over their income, to be doled out later, as the couple saw fit, McFarland said.
Here in California, in particular, any mention of cults seizes our attention. And no wonder. The state has spawned such an abundance of cults over many years that we tend to have a queasy familiarity with some of the details. Those of a certain age will never forget the 1978 Peoples Temple tragedy, in which the Rev. Jim Jones orchestrated the cyanide-laced death of more than 900 of his followers, mostly Bay Area natives, in a fetid Guyana jungle. And then there was the 1997 Heaven’s Gate cult travesty, when 39 people took their own lives in Rancho Santa Fe because they apparently believed death would speed their rendezvous with a spaceship, hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet.
Steven Hassan, an expert who has written extensively about cults, can cite many other instances in which people on the margins lost their agency and then their lives to the influence of cults. He said that His Way Spirit Led Assemblies, as described in news reports, appears to have the characteristics of many other problematic groups he has observed — a tendency to alienate individuals from their family and friends; to isolate members from their neighbors; and to have a system of control that heaps disdain, or worse, on anyone who breaks away.
Ghanem’s sister described how he decided in April 2023 to leave the group and move to Nashville, Tenn., to be closer to family. He started a pest control business, which caused a rupture with his old comrades in the Assemblies, because Ghanem had worked as an exterminator for the church’s vector-control business.
In May 2023, Ghanem received a cease-and-desist letter, accusing him of stealing clients from the group’s pest control business. Before the month ended he had disappeared. Hassan said he had seen other cases like Ghanem’s, in which members of insular groups become valued as “cash cows,” only to be greeted with fury if they try to strike out on their own, allegedly “taking” income the groups claim is theirs.
“The critical thing is finding more members and pursuing the patterns,” Hassan said. He created a four-point system to analyze these patterns, including those that “regulate and dominate their members’ actions,” restrict access to outside perspectives, suppress critical thinking and employ tools such as “love-bombing, guilt, and fear-based indoctrination.”
Hassan would also like to see courts in the U.S. adopt a more liberal interpretation of “undue influence.” Laws focus on protecting children and the elderly, because of their particular vulnerabilities. “But for everyone else, there is a slippery slope,” he said, and too many pathways into bad places.
