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Mom ‘brainwashed’ by cult accused of murdering baby son

After denying Javon Thompson food and water for two days because he would not say “Amen” after meals, the one-year-old’s caretakers waited for a divine sign that their message had been heard: a resurrection.

For more than a week, police said in charging documents describing the scene, the child’s lifeless body lay in the back room of an apartment. Queen Antoinette, the 40-year-old leader of a group that called itself 1 Mind Ministries, brought in her followers and told them to pray. God, she said, would raise Javon from the dead.

Instead, Javon’s body began to decompose.

The boy’s mother, 21-year-old Ria Ramkissoon, and four other people authorities say are members of the group face first-degree murder charges in his death. But Ramkissoon’s mother and attorney say that she was brainwashed by a cult and acted only at the group leader’s will.

“The members of this cult, who were more than twice her age, were calling the shots,” Ramkissoon’s attorney, Steven Silverman, said on Tuesday.

“She bought the program hook, line and sinker,” he said.

Court documents describe a group that operated secretly, dressed all in white and eschewed medical care. Antoinette, also known as Toni Sloan or Toni Ellsberry, called her followers “princes” and “princesses.”

The group never had more than a dozen members. It did not operate out of a remote compound and the specifics of Antoinette’s beliefs are unclear. However, it meets the definition of a cult, said Rick Ross, who has studied cults for 26 years, provided expert testimony and staged hundreds “interventions” to get people out of cults.

“It fits the profile of a classic cult in the sense that it’s a personality-driven group and that Queen Antoinette is that animating personality and central defining element of the group,” Ross said.

Ramkissoon’s association with the group began shortly after Javon was born in September 2005, said her mother, Seeta Khadan-Newton. She gave birth at 18 and was struggling to care for her baby while working and taking college classes, she said.

Khadan-Newton, who moved with her daughter from their native Trinidad when the girl was eight, described Ramkissoon as sweet-natured and trusting.

Khadan-Newton is Hindu, but her daughter became a Christian. Ramkissoon’s church betrayed her trust, her mother said, when its pastor pleaded guilty to molesting boys in the congregation.

Ramkissoon was friends with Tiffany Smith, who at the time was a member of the group, and 1 Mind Ministries began recruiting her, Khadan-Newton said. After spending time with cult members, Ramkissoon started worrying she was going to hell.

“My daughter was very religious. She was into the Bible — obsessed with it,” Khadan-Newton said. “They [were] going to show her the right way. She got sucked into it ... she was brainwashed.”

After cult members abandoned hope of Javon’s resurrection, they switched to Plan B, police say. Antoinette burned Javon’s clothing and mattress and put his body in a green suitcase.

She stuffed the suitcase with mothballs and fabric softener sheets and opened it occasionally to spray disinfectant inside.


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