Convicted Follower Is Still Devoted to Ecclesia Group

Constance Jackson’s face does not brighten often these days. But her eyes light up when she talks about how she met Eldridge Broussard Jr., the man who changed her life.

“Anthony was about to be born,” she says, referring to her son, now 13. “I heard a tape from a next-door neighbor of El and he was preaching on how you really don’t have to die. I was getting ready to go into the hospital to have some extensive surgery. I didn’t feel I was gonna make it, and I heard that tape. I didn’t even know if he was young or old but I said I’m going to meet this so-called man, this preacher.”

Now Jackson is in prison, convicted of manslaughter in the fatal beating of Broussard’s 8-year-old daughter and of child abuse in the beatings of five other children who belonged to Broussard’s Los Angeles-based religious group. Three other adult members of the Ecclesia Athletic Assn. were convicted of manslaughter with her, and five more face charges of child abuse in Oregon and Los Angeles.

Broussard himself, although not charged with any crime, is under investigation by the FBI for violating the civil rights of 53 Ecclesia children who authorities say bear physical and emotional scars. Most, including Jackson’s son, Anthony, are in foster care in Oregon.

Yet Jackson remains deeply committed to Broussard, so dependent on his guidance, that she fasted all last week until prison officials gave him permission to visit her.

In an interview at the Oregon Women’s Correctional Center Friday, Jackson became the first member of Ecclesia other than Broussard and his spokeswoman to talk to a reporter. She shed little additional light on the widely publicized discipline session that led to Dayna Broussard’s death, acknowledging only that she hit the child three times and does not believe she killed her.

Spiritual Strength

But she spoke at length of her life with Ecclesia, her feelings about the manslaughter trial, her desire to see the children reunited with their parents and her quest to remain a spiritual person in prison--something she says she “can’t do without El.”

She is frightened about her future. On June 22, Clackamas County Judge John Lowe sentenced her to a minimum of seven years in prison. She worries that she will become like the women she is meeting there--foul-mouthed, street-wise, possibly a lesbian.

“What kind of person will I be when I come out?” she asks, wiping away tears. “I know as long as El is giving me some spiritual guidance, I’ll be all right. When he gets here, I’m gonna ask him these things. Girls kissing and stuff, is this gonna happen to me?”

These are especially tough questions for Jackson who, at 38, has led both a sheltered and trying life. As a child in Virginia, she was so naive that when she began menstruating, she wrote a letter to her parents, telling them she was dying. When she became pregnant at age 15, she had no idea what had happened to her--or why--until a school official explained.

She married a week before her 16th birthday, and when the marriage didn’t last, she was left alone--a child with a child of her own, struggling to survive in an adult world she says she barely understood.

Wandering Youth

She moved around, from Pennsylvania to Louisiana, Wyoming and Utah, working as a nurse’s assistant and in various jobs before settling in Los Angeles in 1971. She jumped from church to church as well, finding Broussard in 1976, when she was pregnant with her second child and he was preaching out of his father’s house on 99th Street in Los Angeles.

In Broussard, she found someone with a practical view of religion, someone who understood her better than she did herself, she says: “He’s real. You don’t have to be a phony with him.”

So in the late 1970s, Jackson went along with Broussard’s plan for the group to buy and move into a converted bakery on Avalon Boulevard as a way to protect their children from gangs, drugs and the dangers of street life. They would live as an extended family and channel their energies into improving the black community.

“I thought he was crazy,” Jackson said, “but I was willing to work on it because it was going to be mine and my children one day were going to own it, and if we don’t lose it, one day they still will.”

Some former Ecclesia members who are disenchanted with Broussard have accused him of running a cult, of controlling his members and preying upon their vulnerabilities.

But Jackson says Broussard provided a safe haven for her and her children, and she credits him with drastically improving her health and self-image by guiding her through a weight loss program in which she dropped more than 100 pounds.

Her Own Specialty

Broussard told her she could go out and show others how to do what she had done. “I was going to be able to take that into the black community . . . that was what I had, a specialty that nobody else had.”

But all that changed with Dayna Broussard’s death in the group’s rural farmhouse last October.

Jackson and two other Ecclesia women had been in Oregon for three months, caring for the children while Broussard and the rest of the other adults renovated their Los Angeles building. Because the group had attracted media attention and complaints from neighbors the previous summer, the children were not allowed outside.

The result, Jackson said, was an unwieldy situation in which “the kids were climbing up the wall. I did everything that I humanly possibly could to keep it going but they wanted El to come. I could not be El.”

Jackson acknowledges swatting the children on the buttocks with something other than her hand--authorities say it was a braided electrical cord. It was the only way, she said, to keep all of them in line during those three months.

Testimony during the three-week manslaughter trial revealed that Jackson played a subordinate role in the discipline session that led to Dayna’s death. Child witnesses said she bit, hit, kicked and punched Dayna. But they said defendant Willie Chambers, who had arrived in Oregon the day before, administered most of the beating.

Exaggeration Charged

Jackson, who would talk only about her own participation, said she believes the children exaggerated and were coached by the state. She admitted hitting Dayna three times, but insists, “I did not stand by and watch a child be beaten to death.”

Jackson’s court-appointed lawyer has argued that at most, Jackson should have been convicted of a lesser charge. But the prosecutor maintained that all four defendants were equally culpable, and the jury agreed.

Jackson does not believe her trial, before an all-white jury in rural Clackamas County, was fair. She says Oregonians have never made an attempt to understand her or her group. “The people weren’t against me, they wanted a cult,” she says.

When pressed on what caused Dayna’s death, Jackson--who did not testify during the trial--says she does not know.

But as long as she is serving prison time for it, she said, she wishes the state would let the blame rest fully with her, so that the parents who were not in Oregon when Dayna died can have their children back.

Disputed by State

Oregon authorities say that is a simplistic view. As recently as July 7, a juvenile court judge rejected a plan by Ecclesia for the return of the children. And Bart Wilson of the Oregon Children’s Services Division said his agency will continue to resist such plans, as long as the parents deny their children were abused.

“We’re not talking about one incident of abuse,” he said. “We’re talking about a pattern. We’re talking about children that will carry scars for the rest of their lives. We’re talking about a group of 20 adults in which nine, or fully a third, are indicted for child abuse. The parents have to demonstrate some understanding that this did occur.”

Jackson, meanwhile, is hanging onto the hope that Ecclesia will someday reunite. She said she feels responsible for the breakup of the Ecclesia; “Those parents trusted me,” she said, “and I feel like I let them down.”

In prison, she keeps to herself; prison Supt. Robert Schiedler describes her as “a quiet inmate.” She has applied for a clerical job, visits the library when she can and attends religious services, which she says the other inmates treat as a joke.

But mostly, Jackson spends her time waiting--waiting for a visit from Eldridge Broussard.