Faith and ‘The Family’ — The Case of Ricky Rodriguez
The sexually abusive sect had their messiah, then a murder-suicide
Loading rounds into the magazine of a gun at the kitchen table, Ricky Rodriguez filmed a videotape. Serving as a traumatic manifesto, the next day he was going to seek vengeance against the system that abused him. A knife sat there, too, beside duct tape, a drill and gags.
At age 2, his father, David Berg, had called him a prophet and a savior. Now, at 29, he wanted to take down the cult he was raised in. That meant he had to find his mother, even if it meant torturing a woman from his childhood for information on her whereabouts.
Rodriguez needed to know where they hid Karen Zerby away from the public eye, in a life that started, then ended, with violence.
“How can you do that to kids and sleep at night?” Rodriguez asked in the 56-minute recording, staring down the camera in a bone-chilling declaration.
In the late 1960s, Berg formed the Children of God, originally known as “Teens for Christ.” Born out of a Christian coffeehouse and the hippie movement, Berg went from being referred to as “Uncle Dave” to “Mo,” short for Moses. People had started to label Children of God as a cult, so Berg fled to London with Zerby, his wife who also went by the…
