Posted on 04/14/2008 8:17:56 PM PDT by BlackVeil
SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) — Texas officials who took 416 children from a polygamist retreat into state custody sent many of their mothers away Monday, as a judge and lawyers struggled with a legal and logistical morass in one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history.
Of the 139 women who voluntarily left the compound with their children since an April 3 raid, only those with children 4 or younger were allowed to continue staying with them, said Marissa Gonzales, spokewoman for the state Children's Protective Services agency. She did not know how many women stayed.
"It is not the normal practice to allow parents to accompany the child when an abuse allegation is made," Gonzales said.
The women were given a choice: Return to the Eldorado ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a renegade Mormon sect, or go to another safe location. Some women chose the latter, Gonzales said.
The state is accusing the sect of physically and sexually abusing the youngsters and wants to strip their parents of custody and place the children in foster care or put them up for adoption. The sheer size of the case was an obstacle.
"Quite frankly, I'm not sure what we're going to do," Texas District Judge Barbara Walther said after a conference that included three to four dozen attorneys either representing or hoping to represent youngsters.
The mothers were taken away Monday after they and the children were taken by bus under heavy security out of historic Fort Concho, where they had been staying, to the San Angelo Coliseum, which holds nearly 5,000 people and is used for hockey games, rodeos and concerts. The polygamist retreat is about 45 miles south of San Angelo.
Some of the youngsters' mothers complained to Gov. Rick Perry that the children were getting sick in the crowded fort. About 20 children had a mild case of chickenpox, said Dr. Sandra Guerra-Cantu with the state Health Department.
Perry spokesman Robert Black said the governor did not believe the children were being housed in poor conditions at the West Texas fort. "Let's be honest here, this is not the Ritz," Black said, but he called the accommodations "clean and neat."
CPS said the move to the coliseum had been in the works since last week, but couldn't be done sooner because the facility had been booked for another event and had to be cleaned and set up for the children.
CPS also said about two dozen teenage boys were moved to a facility outside San Angelo with the judge's permission. "We don't normally say where we place teens," Gonzales said when asked where they were sent.
Monday's courtroom conference was held to work out the ground rules for a court hearing beginning Thursday on the fate of the children.
The judge made no immediate decisions on how the hearing will be carried out. Among the questions left unanswered: Would a courtroom big enough to hold everyone be available at the Tom Green County Courthouse, or would some kind of video link be employed?
Texas bar officials said more than 350 lawyers from across the state have volunteered to represent the children free of charge. Moreover, the 139 mothers who voluntarily left the sect to be with their children will need lawyers, too, to help them fight for custody.
The sheer numbers left the judge perplexed as she considered suggestions from the lawyers for how to handle Thursday's hearing.
"It would seem inefficient to have a witness testify 416 times," the judge offered. "If I gave everybody five minutes, that would be 70 hours."
In an unintended illustration of the problem, Walther gave the lawyers 30 minutes to break into groups and report back to her with ideas. It took almost two hours for everyone to reassemble.
The raid followed a call to a domestic violence hot line from a 16-year-old girl who said she was beaten and raped by her 50-year-old husband.
In addition to becoming a monumental legal morass, the case is proving to be a public-relations headache for the state.
Over the weekend, some of the mothers went on the offensive, complaining the children are falling ill and are frightened and traumatized from living in cramped conditions at the fort, with cots, cribs and playpens lined up side by side.
The secretive nature of the sect — and the indoctrination children receive from birth to mistrust outsiders — have added to the confusion.
Randoll Stout, one of the lawyers who plan to represent some of the children, said the youngsters "seem to change their names. Adults change their names. Children are passed around."
Betty Balli Torres, executive director of the Texas Access to Justice Foundation, said 10 women went into the San Angelo legal aid office last week seeking help and reported there were 100 more women who needed lawyers.
Attorneys began meeting with the women over the weekend. She said it was vital that the mothers be represented by lawyers. Otherwise, they could lose their children — "what we call kind of the death penalty of family law cases," she said.
A church lawyer, Rod Parker, said the 60 or so men remaining on the 1,700-acre ranch have offered to leave the compound if the state would allow the women and children to return to the place with child welfare monitors. But the state Children's Protective Services agency said it had not yet seen the offer and had no comment on it.
The sect practices polygamy in arranged marriages between underage girls and older men. The group has thousands of followers in two side-by-side towns in Arizona and Utah. The sect's prophet and spiritual leader, Warren Jeffs, is in prison for forcing an underage age into a marriage in Utah.
In Salt Lake City, dozens of polygamist wives with children in tow held a rally on the steps of City Hall to denounce the Texas raid. Rally organizers brought 475 wrapped care packages for the children in state custody.
"Reunite these children with their families. Let them go home," said Kent Johnson, an 18-year-old in a pinstripe suit who choked up.
Associated Press reporter Kelley Shannon contributed to this story from Austin.
Welfare scam? Hmmm, let’s see: 1/ Get married legally the first time. 2/ Other wives - marry in church only; no civil license. 3/ Have separate living quarters on your property for other wives (mobile homes are OK). 4/ Other wives have kids, go on welfare as single moms. 5/ When the gumm’nt snoops, the party line is that “I felt sorry for that poor lady, bought her a trailer, let her park it on my property, etc.” End of speculation.
Now, on to my firsthand experience in western UT: Overall, they’re a likeable bunch of folks. Not real educated or sophisticated, though (as if New Yorkers were any great deal either). Most all the kids look like they’ve been bleached in Clorox. They oughta import some Italians or South Americans to put some color in their pups. ;o) BTW, many of the guys have only one wife, and have been with the community for decades. Some say a big concern is that disenfranchised testosterone-filled male young’uns are a danger to any society. Just look at the Arabs; no contact with wimmings ‘till marriage makes ‘em crazy.
These parents send their children, some as young as early teens, to marry 50 year old men and let them have sexual intercourse and have babies. They deserve not just to lose their children, but jailed or executed.
“I’m not so sure I can imagine anything much more wicked that the state could do,”
I can. They sit back and let this cult continue to rape and impregnate their children.
>>They also use every loophole in the book to avoid paying taxes on their property or any income they make.<<
Wow, none of us FreePers would ever do that.
One can only imagine the sick perversions ongoing around the country today, with the homosexual community so devoted to fostering children, which probably won’t ever see the light of day for another 20-70 years.
It is probably a blessing in disguise to closely analyze this incident so that when future perversions become public, they might be righteously resolved by our judicial and law enforcement systems.
The allegations need not be proved on a case-by-case basis? Or there does not need to probable cause applied to a specific individual? Well, that’s a first in American justice.
And if the men were removed, while leaving the mothers (or most of them), I am at a loss as to how the “rape and impregnation” activities could continue.
What the “men” need to realize is that they are not running the show anymore.
I agree fully with what you have said.
It seems to me that if the state intends to pursue this madness to its full conclusion, that many of the children will be adults by the time the hearings, appeals, and lawsuits are finally at an end.
Be careful about hesitating to condemn anyone, when facing extreme evil.
You can bet that for every hesitance to charge, take action, convict or even accuse somebody in this situation, there will be 10 homosexuals in the international and American community closely watching and learning how they might be able to act without being held accountably with foster and adopted children. In most of those cases, such criminal behavior might go undetected by the public for decades.
Consider this compound in the news. It didn’t just spring up overnight.
Works for me.
“Anybody know where this group gets its funding?”
welfare fraud.
They detest the outside world, but are quite willing to live off the earnings of outsiders.
Since some of these women refuse to tell the authorites which children are blood related to them, I feel no pain if the children are “taken” from them. If the mothers refuse to claim them, why should we care if the state takes them away?!
I don’t condemn the action the authorities took at all. There was a cry for help. They acted on it. It was a communal living arrangement, by all accounts. So all would be suspect.
But until there is a trial and verdict..I don’t think anyone can truly say what the whole story is. Sorry, but until the evil is proven, I won’t condemn anyone. My gut level says, probably a very bad thing.
That maybe why the mothers were removed from the older children. They won’t be coached.
I am kind of curious about the male to female breakdown of these children. I have heard there are as many as 400 girls? Haven't heard anything about boys except what I quoted above. I understand that these perverts dump the adolescent boys out on the street, but what happens to the young males?
Thank God that there is someone here who knows how this is going to turn out! sarc/
This whole thing sure looks ugly to me. Removing the women and children and then separating the children from their mothers to be sent out to foster homes. Who's crackpot idea was this? Isn't that adding insult to injury and God knows what else? How is that an improvement over their previous condition? People used to marry a lot earlier in the 1800's when the Original LDS church was established. You got married right after puberty. You had to grow up a lot faster and accept the mantle of manhood and womanhood. Even in the Bible, did not the kings have a wife and their concubines? Polygamy has been practiced all over the world for thousands of years. It's nothing new. Save the children for what? How is the common good magnified by inflicting such a psychic wound upon these children?
I saw it also. Jaw dropping. She said ‘Nazi camps’ AC had to fill in the ‘concentration’ for her. Then she said she was ‘studied in history.’
She appeared angry, aggressive and confrontational.
All I can say is just — wow! She was a PR nightmare.
After seeing that it makes me grateful my State had the good sense to get those kids out of there.
Could you ping me to this list if their is one? Thanks.
In the year of our Lord 2008, the legal age of consent in Texas is 17. And polygamy is illegal.
I knew that. On the other hand, are we not encouraging our kids to expeeeeeeeeriment with sexxxxxx and explore different expeeeeeriences, yada yada yada? I'm not so much looking at it from a legal perspective, as a cultural one. Now if that church is running a scam by having the "spiritual wives" collect welfare that is clearly fraud and should be dealt with by cutting off the government teat. I frankly don't think the government has the cahones to take on this issue in the Muslim community.
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