The owners of a southeast Missouri boarding school locked a former student in a room on her 18th birthday and kept her from going home for months, court records allege.

A court affidavit released Monday describes the kidnapping charges against Carmen and Larry Musgrave. It details what one student said she experienced more than 15 years ago at ABM Ministries, a Christian boarding school near Piedmont, about 330 miles southeast of Kansas City.

“Carmen told (the student) that she needed to understand that nobody cared that it was her 18th birthday, and she wasn’t special, and she wasn’t leaving,” the affidavit said. “(She) stayed in the room and was not free to leave the building. All doors were locked and only a staff member had the key.”

The Star spoke to the student last month, and she shared the same experiences she did with Wayne County authorities.

The Musgraves own ABM Ministries — also known as Lighthouse Christian Academy. They are being held without bond in the Wayne County Jail in Greenville on first-degree kidnapping charges. Court records show they also face charges of false imprisonment, abuse or neglect of a child and endangering the welfare of a child.

Wayne County Sheriff Dean Finch served the arrest warrants Friday night at the ABM campus. He took several deputies with him, as well as two troopers with the Missouri Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime Control.

Those authorities spoke to all 19 students at the boarding school, Finch said Saturday.

In interviews with The Star, nearly a dozen former students have described how they said they were treated at the school over the past nearly 20 years. That included physical abuse and restraints, not being allowed to make eye contact with fellow students, standing for hours at a time staring at a wall when they were in trouble and being forced to do manual labor to benefit the school.

They also detailed how food was used as a punishment, saying that if they were in trouble they were given little to eat, such as a tortilla smeared with peanut butter for breakfast or plain white rice for dinner. And, they said, they had to watch as other students ate large portions of prepared meals.

The arrests and charges came more than a week after The Star detailed how several boys had run away from ABM Ministries since Jan. 13.

Two of those boys were helped by a local resident who took them home after they flagged her down and asked her to call 911. That resident, and another neighbor, told The Star that the boys were “terrified” and said the 12- and 14-year-old reported that they were hit for no reason or because they didn’t finish chores fast enough.

They also said they were berated by school staff, especially the Musgraves. Deputies picked up the boys and initially returned them to the school.

Finch told The Star that all five boys who ran away since mid-January have been sent back home.

The student who said she was locked in a room on her 18th birthday in 2007 also told authorities how she said she and the other students were treated at the school, which at the time also admitted girls.

“The students were told when and how to do everything, to the point of who to look at, when to go to the bathroom, how long you could use the restroom and the amount of toilet paper you could use,” the records said. “Every aspect of (their) lives were controlled.”

The former student described mental and physical abuse, including “really, really hard exercises” that would last for hours. That included running, planks “and things that people see in boot camps,” court records said, adding, “This would occur with no food or water.”

The former student recalled one time when the students would “run, run, run, run, run” and then Carmen would “have like 5-gallon buckets of ice water and there was like a 50 gallon drum filled with ice water.”

“She would make us line up and we would have to dunk our heads all the way under the water and ice,” the student said.

On one occasion, a student was accused of drinking the water. The former student said Carmen held the girl’s head underwater by “holding the back of her neck and pushing her head into the bucket of ice water.”

She said the girl was “freaking out.”

Finch told The Star that this first wave of charges was just the beginning of his extensive investigation. He said he plans to travel out of state to interview more former students.

This is a developing story and will be updated.