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.
because texas law has a consent provision.
and
because the prosecution tried before and dropped the ball.
and
because the case STARTED with a flawed warrant
...
how do you rescue someone who does not want to be rescued? (seriously “I am from the government and I am here to help” is not the mantra of customer confidence)
There is a two track path on this case. The social and the legal.
The social will be fixed with a few hundred DNA tests to sort out who belongs to which child. It has to be done. PERIOD.
Second there has to be legal reform in the sense that as a matter of law, a child may have only ONE mother and ONE father. (fixes some other issue too but that is a bonus) There also has to be reform for this 14 to 17 consent provision. Texas must do away with common law marriage as other states have done.
The legal aspects need to be constitutional and hard. Identify the boss wives as any other type of Mob lieutenant and deal with them as accessories.
punt on the bad warrant. Immediatly build secondary branches to the evident to survive the inevitable appeals and survive poison fruit arguments.
FINALLY remember these are children we are dealing with. We must not burn the village to save it. Some we will be able to help to find their way out of the polygamy aspects. Others, who are adults, may simply not want to go. (milton and all that) if they have committed no crime we can’t stop that. These are human beings we are dealing with, they have a right to choose wrongly (for themselves) as much as the right to choose correctly.
take a look at that for the 14-17 provisions. Apparently a parent can “consent” to the relations.
Texas also has common law marraige but forbids it to the under 18 crowd.
all at http://www.findlaw.com
Let's see how that works: People used to marry a lot earlier in the 1800's when the Original LDS church was established. You got married [to dirty old men with multiple wives like Joseph Smith or Brigham Young] right after puberty.
Boy the veneer has really come off the Mormon Church this week. Defending the indefensible. Keep it up. You guys are showing your true colors.
That was intended; this whole action is faulty; the true point lies not in the numbers but in the very fact that the existence of a pregnant teen in a family has never been used to remove all of the children from that family before, to our knowledge.
Remember that these remain allegations without proof and liberty should be deprived only after adjudication.
“Safekeeping” on a scale this size is unprecedented.
Quite the opposite-— if there is a pregnant teen in a family where there is suspicion of abuse or neglect, yes, all children will be removed. And honestly, the last time I saw that happen was in a case where Daddy had married Mama with three teenage daughters and proceeded to have a harem (mother complicit and actually helping restrain girls).
Cite case, please.
In this county around 1989 to 1991 or so, it made America’s Most Wanted because the parents fled. There were 2 or 3 babies born to the 2 older teens that were adopted by local community members. I believe the girls have long since moved away, changed their names etc.
It was a major scandal because the family was middle class and the girls went to school Folks assumed that they were ‘loose’ (because they kept having kids) but no one noted that they weren’t flirting with, much less dating boys.
If my mother was alive, she’d know all the data. I can look it up, but it may take a while (or longer).
The total bitch of the situation is that you are correct. I have zero sympathy for these pedophiles, but a horrible precedent is being set here.
I am not Mormon, nor am I a polygamist.
I’ve been wondering where the Arabs think they’ll get all their money once they kill all of us. The Chinese? But the Chinese aren’t going to convert to Islam either - and it’s going to take quite a bit of time and effort to kill all of them.
But if they kill all of us, the Chinese won’t have our money to give to the Arabs - or the need for so much oil to run their industries.
Oil isn’t any good for their personal wealth if they insist on murdering their customers.
No one has posted it, but immediately after she was on Carolyn Jessop followed. CJ identified her by her voice and said, “That's Kathleen.” She was the one who went to the common husband and told about CJ’s getting ready to leave. CJ made a good point. She wants her freedom but doesn't want anyone else to have it?
This interview was proceeded or followed by a CNN correspondent who was in that UT/AZ town. He said they were intimidated, cornered in their vehicle and that they ran for the AZ line because all the police on the Utah side were flds. You could tell the guy was scared.
On the same broadcast they mentioned there had been another call from the same girl from Arizona. Possible several other calls. Their conclusion was she had been spirited away from the Texas compound.
I read that post. I wonder if this weirdo is on UTube.
Besides welfare fraud, there's this:
"The Defense Department awarded $1.2 million in contracts to an aircraft parts supplier linked to the West Texas polygamist retreat that has been unraveled by a massive child welfare investigation, according to a newspaper report.
New Era Manufacturing, based in Nevada, where the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is primarily based, also received a $900,000 federal small-business loan in 2005, according to records found by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
John Nielsen, a former employee who worked for the company when it was known as Utah-based Western Precision in 2005, said in a 2005 affidavit as part of a civil lawsuit that church members were made to work for little or no wages.
Nielsen said in the affidavit that he and other sect members thought their work would bring them redemption, while $50,000 to $100,000 in company profits were given each month to the church "and/or" Jeffs.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported last year that JNJ Engineering, another company owned and operated by church leaders, won $11.3 million in government contract work from the Las Vegas Valley Water District. All but one of the contract workers came from Hildale and Colorado City, Ariz., where most of the sect's 10,000 members live."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5700799.html
Here’s the link to the Anderson Cooper interview with the FDLS Woman:
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/04/15/inside-the-compound-and-face-to-face-with-polygamy/
Saw that. I posted the same info on another thread somewhere around here!
It was quite a show, wasn’t it? Normally I don’t watch AC but happened to be flipping channels last night. Will be watching again tonight.
Same here, bonfire. I’m not a CNN lover, but I thought he did a very good job.
Her interview coupled with the interview from the guy and his film crew in Colorado City, UT sealed the deal for me.
If a grown man with a film crew is intimidated, just think how a child must feel.
Did you catch what they were saying about the additional phone calls from the first child? I watched it twice and was not able to understand what they were saying about additional calls.
That part was very confusing. From what I understood is they thought the girl was calling from both the Colorado AND Eldorado compounds. Then the OTHER Jessup woman who has the help line for these girls was said to be getting continual phone calls from a girl that they BELIEVE is same 16 yr. old. (as in: she’s still getting these calls)
THEN they said the calls might be coming from somewhere else where the FLDS might have “taken” her.
Is that what you heard??
Now it’s probably all just rumors and bits and pieces that the reporters are getting...so I’m not taking any of it as fact!
IF the FLDS have whisked her outta there, I doubt she has access to a cell phone anymore.
I hope they clarify some of this tonight because I was DIZZY afterwards!
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