FAYETTEVILLE (KFSM)- Jennifer Inman has known Catherine Grove since elementary school when the Grove family moved to Madison County.
"I knew this bouncy, bubbly, smiling, excited girl full of life," she said. "What happened? What happened to you?"
The last time the two spoke was in 2008 when they were both nursing students, but Inman said a nearly hour-long video of Grove posted by the Church of Wells on YouTube on April 16 prompted her to say something.
"I don't know what's going inside the church, I'm not there," Inman said. "But I know what I see."
In September 2013, Grove’s parents, Andy and Patty Grove, told reporters they were worried their daughter had been brainwashed by those belonging to the Church of Wells. She had gone missing from Fayetteville in July 2013, according to the website of the University Baptist Church in Fayetteville, and resurfaced several days later in Wells.
According to a 2013 report in the Texas Observer, the Church of Wells is an evangelical church “born of discontent with mainstream Christianity.”
Inman said she and Grove went to the same church and Grove was always dedicated to her faith. The two also bonded riding horses on the Grove family farm and playing soccer.
"The most vivid memories I have with her are running down the soccer fields beside her, asking her to pass me the ball or pass back." she said. "I guess that's where we really connected."
Inman said Grove also had singing parts in some of the school plays and was an overall great student, who was fluent in Spanish and French.
"Catherine, she was smart, she was an honors student," Inman said. "Where she is now is degrading her, as far as her intelligence."
Inman said Grove was shy, but not one to let someone speak for her and Inman feels that that's what Sean Morris, one of the three pastors, was doing in the YouTube video.
"This video exists because Catherine wants to suppress the slander," Morris says in the video. "Catherine wants to speak her own personal testimony about what has happened."
Inman said Grove is still the intelligent woman she's always known.
"Everybody says 'Catherine was, Catherine was,' but you never are a 'was' unless you no longer exist," she said.
Inman said the situation has encouraged her to rekindle her relationship with Grove's parents.
"They just miss their daughter," she said. "As a mother myself I can't imagine not talking to my daughter every day and not hearing 'how was your day' or 'what did you accomplish,' so looking at that from my perspective, I would be broken and I'm sure that they are, they would have to be."
According to Inman, Grove's parents don't want to keep her at home, but they do want her back in their lives.
"Nobody wants to steal her happiness or what she has found as a way of life," she said. "We just want her back in our lives and to see that bright smile and that happiness. She really was a joy to have in our lives and that's what we would all like to have back or even if we can't have her back, we want to see her happy."
Inman said Grove appears sad in the YouTube video and that's what most concerns her.
"I don't know what happened to Catherine, only Catherine knows that, but something did," Inman said.
5NEWS spoke with Sean Morris on April 3, the same day Grove briefly came back to Arkansas with her father.
"I am thankful that she is there visiting with her parents, seeing them and talking with them and we have encouraged her to speak with them and be with them and love them and honor them as a mother father as much as she possibly can," Morris said speaking over the phone from Wells. "We don't believe Andy and Patty Grove believe and follow the Biblical Lord Jesus Christ. We've spent many hours discussing with them the Scriptures, discussing the Gospel, discussing Christian living and we don't believe they're following the Biblical Jesus Christ, but one of the figment of their imagination that this culture of Americanized Christianity has created."
The full interview with Morris can be heard below:
Grove was reunited with her father at the Angelina County, Texas, Sheriff’s Department on April 3, according to Capt. Alton Lenderman.
Authorities located Grove after she called 911 about 9:30 p.m. on April 2, saying she was walking on a road near Wells, Texas. A deputy responding to the call took Grove to the Sheriff’s Department in Lufkin, Lenderman said. Wells is 17 miles north of Lufkin.
The full 911 call made by Grove can be heard below:
According to Grove's YouTube testimony, her family took away the house phone and her cell phone while she was in Northwest Arkansas. They also refused to take her back to Wells and instead took her to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.
"A doctor told me before I went into the psych ward that they were going to admit me involuntarily because I wasn't agreeing with my parents that I had a mental illness of some kind," Grove says in the video. "I told them my desire was to be in Wells."
Grove goes on to say the doctors didn't diagnose her with a mental illness, so her parents couldn't get legal guardianship over her. That's when the hospital allowed her to use a phone, which she used to call the Church of Wells so that its members could come get her in St. Louis. According to the video, Grove was back in Wells on April 8.
According to a report in the Lufkin Daily News, Grove intends to marry church member Ronnie Saltsman. She also told the newspaper she left the church to rebuild a relationship with her parents, as long as they respected her decision to stay with the church.