A California woman will spend three years in federal prison for plotting to have her estranged son kidnapped and taken to the now-shuttered Agape Boarding School in southwest Missouri.
Despite her son’s restraining order against her, Shana Gaviola arranged in 2021 for her son to be taken against his will from a Fresno, California, ice-skating rink to the Christian reform school for troubled boys. Two people acting on Gaviola’s behalf abducted her son, then 16, and drove him 27 hours in handcuffs to Stockton, Missouri, according to federal prosecutors.
The teenager was “detained” at the school — which closed in 2023 amid findings of abuse — for about eight days until he was released to his father, prosecutors said.
Gaviola, 39, of Fresno County, was convicted in December of interstate violation of a protection order and sentenced last week. She was charged along with Julio Sandoval, Agape’s former dean of students. He was acquitted of the same charge after a five-day trial.
Prosecutors alleged Gaviola contacted Sandoval, who ran a transportation company that took kids to Agape, and paid the company to get her son. She gave the transporters fake court documents to convince them they had authority to do so, according to a 2022 indictment.
But by then, Gaviola’s son had obtained a temporary restraining order against his mother and petitioned to become an emancipated minor.
Eric Grant, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, said Gaviola had her son taken to Agape “ostensibly in the exercise” of her religious beliefs.
“No parent — indeed, no person whatsoever — has the right to subject a child to kidnapping and terror for that reason or any other reason,” Grant said in a statement.
Sandoval and his transportation company, Safe, Sound, Secure Youth Ministries, still face a lawsuit brought in 2023 by Gaviola’s son. The Midwest Newsroom could not reach Sandoval for comment.
The lawsuit alleges Sandoval’s transportation company arrived at the teen’s workplace “armed with guns, tasers and handcuffs.” He was thrown into a rental car and only allowed to eat a “single order of french fries” during the day-long drive, according to the Cedar County lawsuit.
The teen told the transporters about the protective order against his mother. They told him he was a delinquent “who was never going to see his friends again,” his attorneys wrote.
Once at Agape, the teenager said he was strip-searched, given clothes to represent a “prison style hierarchy” and physically and emotionally abused by staff.
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