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.
Keep the mothers with their children? Reports state many of the teenage girls as young as 15 are pregnant. The children are being seperated from both parents so they can get the real story about what both of them where doing to them. Investigators at the shelter where the kids were being held said the mothers kept telling the children to give them different names each time and don’t identify who their parents are. Many of these kids have been tossed around so many families, they don’t even know who their parents are.
Former FLDS members have claimed being extremely physically absued by not just the males, but other females (rival wives and their children) due to the competition involved in mulitple wives.
This cult brought this trouble on themsevles.
Actually it is very much a legal issue.
This post is very different from your first post, or maybe I’m tired. What does this have to do with the Muslim community?
I wondered about that, as well.
Here is a list of the children, with as much detail as the authorities could muster. I have not done a count, and they are described as "a child" not boy or girl, but one can classify them by name:
http://www.myeldorado.net/Pages/LegalNotices.html
This is (forewarning) a pro-polygamy site that has an archived editorial on convicted child rapist, welfare cheat, and bigamist Tom Green: http://www.pro-polygamy.com/articles.php?news=0022
Interesting that people who freely advocate polygamy amongst adults don't like the FLDS any more than the rest of society.
A quick search using the terms "welfare fraud" and "polygamy" will give you all you need to know; mostly that you and I pay for these people to break the law and abuse children.
Sounds like the age of majority is five in those official’s minds.
This case is going to drag on for years, while kids five and up are stripped from their parents with our without cause.
Even if the authorities are justified in taking action, these cases are very very ugly.
My daughter watched her and said “Mom, is she retarded?”
She sure looked “inbred”.
It won't be though. Down on the Animal Farm some religions are more equal than others.
Oink! Oink!
I completely agree!
The precedent that this sets is horrific. Will other members of other Christian religions be in danger of losing their children because of an anonymous phone call?
Also....Do you want to bet that the state authorities will turn a blind eye to **documented** Muslim abuses where **real** evidence exists?
Gee sounds like most of the Arab world. Hate us, wish us dead but take our money. See a pattern here?
My gut level says, probably a very bad thing.
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Many of these innocent children will be sexually abused in child welfare system!
That’s what my “gut” tells me.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the "single mothers" rented their apartments in the compound using Section 8 grants from the government (another source of income to the sect).
I also would not be surprised to discover a Food Stamp fraud scam bringing in some money
Unraveling all this may provide some good insight into how people scam the welfare system (if the bureaucrats allow the info to see the light of day)
Yes we will add you to the Flying Inman Ping list.
It would seem to make more sense, at first blush, to take the men off the ranch and leave the women and children. However, they have no right to arrest all the men without fist having grounds for arrest. They simply don’t have that. (Some of the men may not even be married.)
Apparently, they believe they have more legal grounds to protect the children, thus allowing for an order of temporary custody. At least they can point to the number of girls, who appear to be under the age of consent. Once they identify who impregnated these girls. Then they would have the right to remove those men from the ranch.
Having said that, I’m also upset they removed the mothers. It should have been enough to cut off their communication with the men to protect witness tampering.
What I see in this is these kinds of perverts loading themselves up in a U-Haul and heading out of the state of Texas and closing down their compounds to avoid a knock on the door. Utah has room for them.
It might not pass the smell test unless they can produce the girl who made the call and so far they can't.
So, you really believe that if the authorities know who and where this girl is they are going to broadcast the information so that she will be a target for retaliation?
These fundamentalist mormon cults believe in blood atonement. Look it up.
Well now, I've been out of practice for awhile, but from what I remember from law school, the “fruit of the poisonous tree” requires that the governmental authorities act in bad faith, or at least sloppy negligence, when instituting their initial search. In this case, the authorities acted on what they believed was a bona fide complaint. If any fraud was committed, it was on the part of the complainant, not the government.
Anyhow, that's the argument I'd make in court if I were the prosecutor.
Last night on Fox, Greta interviewed the lawyer for the supposed culprit, Dale Barlow. According to him, the Texas authorities had interviewed Barlow in Arizona, had corroborated the fact that Barlow hasn’t left Arizona in five years, had corroborated with Barlow’s parole officer that Barlow has been 100 percent compliant, and has never left the state. But they executed the warrant for Barlow in Texas, anyway. Good faith?
PS. All of the foregoing was done BEFORE the warrant was executed. It seems to me the Texas authorities must have known they had a warrant for the wrong guy.
I’ve also heard that there was an almost identical call of complaint made to Arizona authorities at about the same time, but they didn’t follow up because they couldn’t get any corroboration.
How was Cooper's 'demeanor' towards her? Was he neutral, or could you detect an attitude?
ah but lets not forget.
you can’t shield a fake tip with a a good faith act. At least not from a motion for the court and appeal. They would have to show the call came from SOME number. They record all calls to police these days, there are pin registers.
If it turns out the call came from another cop, or from one of the prosecutors, then the good faith of the OTHER cops is not going to create a chinese wall.
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