Man accused of using child labor in his fish markets dies while awaiting trial
The religious leader charged earlier this year with using children as slave labor at fish markets in the Fayetteville area has died.
The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office told The News & Observer that John C. McCollum, 67, died at his home while under hospice care. McCollum’s attorney, Allen Rogers, told WRAL TV the cause was congestive heart failure.
McCollum was one of 10 people arrested in January on charges that they used the slave labor of children as young as 9 to run fish markets. Some of the victims were children of the operators or managers of the markets, officials said.
Lt. Sean E. Swain, public information officer for the Sheriff’s Office, said then that the department got a report in February 2017 that “an alternative religious group” was living on and around a property commonly referred to as McCollum Ranch, at 5953 McCollum Road in Godwin.
The leader of the religious group was identified as McCollum, who was a preacher in Fayetteville since at least the late 1980s. He had not gone on trial for the January charges and apparently had been released on bond in May.
Police told The N&O in January that they had tried for three decades to get people who lived, worked or worshipped with McCollum to talk about what went on at the two-acre ranch in northeastern Cumberland County.
McCollum provided members of his Holy Tabernacle Born Again Faith Inc. a place to live, with certain ones moving into the main house, a mobile home that was added on to until it had six bedrooms, five baths and nearly 8,000 square feet, according to tax records. Other church members had rooms or apartments in outbuildings scattered around the property.
In exchange, former followers and police say, adherents worshipped as McCollum taught them, dressed as he told them, raised their children as he directed and worked as he needed them in a small empire of fish markets, food trucks and other businesses bearing his name.
After McCollum’s arrest, The N&O talked to people who painted opposing portraits of the itinerant preacher, church patriarch and businessman, who was known as “Prophet,” “Chief” or “Dad” to followers.
Tobias Gardner, a man who says he lived on the compound with his family in the 1990s, called McCollum a cruel, self-styled religious fanatic and con man who gathered women and children around him and gradually took control of every aspect of their lives, from their finances to their food to whether they could go to the bathroom during church services. Gardner said his father was forced to clean up after pigs, chickens and other animals because McCollum believed he was an inferior person.
“He would basically categorize people by how much money they had, or on their knowledge,” Gardner said. “They called my dad a dummy.”
But a woman who said she was a follower of McCollum and lived at the compound describes him in a YouTube video as a righteous man of God who helped the homeless and healed the sick.
“Do you care that a decent black man is being persecuted?” the woman, who identified herself as Beverly Briggs, asked in a 22-minute video posted just after McCollum was arrested, but no longer is available.
This story was originally published August 29, 2018 at 7:06 PM.