Posted on 04/26/2008 4:24:46 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative
A Corpus Christi attorney representing two mothers from the West Texas polygamist retreat claims child welfare authorities cannot account for two boys, but the state says that's not true.
The boys, ages 16 months and 11 years, were part of a group of more than 400 removed from their parents' custody this week after the retreat, 40 miles south of San Angelo, was raided earlier this month amid allegations of sexual abuse.
The children have been bused to foster homes across the state. The last group left early Friday.
State child welfare authorities responded that no children have been lost, but family relationships are muddled, hence the need for genetic testing to determine them.
Rebecca Flanigan, with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid in Corpus Christi, said the children are not on any of the state's placement lists. She said Child Protective Services has not returned her phone calls or e-mails on the matter.
"They haven't been spirited away," Flanigan said. "They have not been accounted for. Not on any one of CPS' placement lists. We don't know where they are, nor do they know."
Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Department of Family and Protective Services, said he is not aware of any children who were unaccounted for.
"Each of the children has an attorney, as do many of the parents," Crimmins said.
He said the department has had difficulty determining several parent-child relationships, but that parents will be given the opportunity for visitation as soon as the children arrive in foster care.
Flanigan said four mothers she represents want to know where their children are because each expects to move to be near them. Those efforts have been hampered because many of the mothers have not been told where their children have been taken. One of her clients has seven children going to four different cities.
"These are toddlers who in a few weeks' time will not know who their mothers are because they've been taken from them," Flanigan said. "When you get sucked into this bureaucracy, you really don't know who is in charge and who will influence the decision to reunite these children with their moms."
Flanigan is one of three Corpus Christi attorneys from Legal Aid who traveled to northwest Texas to help.
"It was a cry for help. We got in our cars and headed out," said Errol Summerlin, deputy director of Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid.
State and local officials had been eyeing the sect suspiciously since it bought the ranch in 2003 and moved hundreds of its members in. They raided the property April 3, with heavy weapons and SWAT vehicles, after a female claiming to be a 16-year-old girl at the ranch called a family violence shelter and said her 49-year-old husband beat and raped her. That girl has not yet been identified.
Flanigan also has filed a motion to an appeals court in Austin, seeking to overturn proceedings April 17-18 in which a judge decided the fate of several of the sect's children en masse. She specifically seeks a proceeding in which each family has an opportunity to deny abuse individually.
"It's a nightmare, a parent's worst nightmare, to have their children taken without a fair opportunity for the court to hear their case individually and explain the danger and risk that compelled the removal of their children, and to explain how it could possibly be in their children's best interest," she said.
Michael Zamora/Caller-Times Ark employees and state workers put up a sheet to block the view of women
and children from the raided polygamist ranch coming off the bus Friday into the Ark Assessment Center
and Emergency Shelter for Youth in Corpus Christi.
Michael Zamora/Caller-Times Ark employees and state workers move out beds and bring in cribs to some
of the living quarters Friday as they prepare for the arrival of a small number of women and children from
the raided polygamist ranch at the Ark Assessment Center and Emergency Shelter for Youth in Corpus Christi.
However, I have real problems with the State separating the young children from the parents....
I believe the State is way overstepping their bounds in this area and that we should all be concerned...
Weird photo on the top there. Massively overweight woman is carrying a huge load of food, while apparently anorexic woman appears to be carrying just a single bottle of water. Let’s hope these two aren’t in charge of the children’s diets!
Simple answer. Each is carrying her own lunch. :-/
You are right!!!
The *food* appears to be Variety Paks of potato & corn chips - in RED PLASTIC BAGS.
There’ll be hell to pay when the FLDS & ACLU see those photos.
I'd have a problem with it if the parents had been willing to identify their own children, and the children old enough to talk had been willing and able to identify their own parents. Didn't happen. It's not clear that even a single specific instance has been documented of parents who identified themselves being separated from children who identified those same parents as their own. I also haven't seen a report of a single case where either one mother, or one mother/father pair have identified themselves to the court (that means first names AND last names AND birth dates), identified specific children as their own by names, ages, birthdates, and physical descriptions, and formally petitioned the court to give those specific children back to this specific mother or mother/father couple. So far there's been no public claim of any such petition from any attorney representing FLDS parents, so I assume no such petition has been filed. It's just been demands that all the children be given back the the whole group of adults who claim to be parents.
Given substantial evidence suggesting that many of these children have one or both biological parents living elsewhere than the compound, and that many of the children have biological fathers who have been expelled from the cult and not allowed any contact with or even information as to the location of their children, it would be awfully imprudent for the court to just hand the huge group of children (with its tremendously skewed gender ratio that is inexplicable by anything other than child abandonment or worse) back to this big group of adults who are claiming that "they" are "ours".
Rescued children
Yes, if they are not aware of them, it would explain why they are unaccounted for....
These two parents have a lawyer, and seem to know exactly who their two boys are.
Of course, there aren’t supposed to be any boys in the cult, so maybe that is causing some confusion.
And of course, none of the parents are supposed to know who their children are, so maybe that is causing confusion as well.
It takes a pretty big suspension of disbelief to accept without question that 400+ children were removed and not one of the parents knew who their children were — especially when we have Jessop as proof that women at the compound knew exactly who their children were and who the father was.
THanks. Kids with their parents and smiling. CPS better take care of that right away — oh wait, they did.
But don’t worry, I’m sure those kids will be smiling again in a month, when they’ve learned the pleasures of eating chips and cupcakes and drinking soda and watching 15-year-olds having sex on TV.
Don’t these children have some sort of right to privacy, or can the government parade them around for photo ops?
The mass hearing thing is a big problem for me. Could have been done a lot better. This judge is in over her head. If some one want’s to post up how would you have done it better be prepared for a long post or maybe a long freempmail.
They do look the object of misery now that they have been rescued , don’t they?
You want them sequestered away so you can claim how frightened and ill treated they are, and if they weren’t than why is the government hiding them. Sorry this is a State of Texas operation, not a federal BATF thing like Waco. Different operator, different procedures, different results.
What are their names? And what’s their lawyer’s name? And what are their children’s names and ages? And what’s your source for the claim that they have specifically petitioned the court for a hearing re their own children?
And you are very confused about Carolyn Jessop’s history. She left the cult before this compound came into existence. She was married at 18, long before Warren Jeffs became prophet and decreed that all girls had to marry at 14. She left BECAUSE of the increasingly extreme and abusive demands that Warren Jeffs was beginning to make on the church members, and BECAUSE he was talking about building this compound. Things have changed a lot in the FLDS church over the past 5-6 years, and life in this compound involves an even more extreme form of control over members than exists even now at the other FLDS communities, and far more extreme than what existed in any FLDS community before this compound was established. The compound was established for the purpose of completely isolating a selected group of members from the outside world, and exerting more control over them than had been possible in the other communities, where the boundaries of inside and outside were blurrier.
Now in my kids public school, at the beginning of each school year, a photo release statement is sent home and parents are to sign off if they permit their child's photo/name to be used in any media...but...ooops, I forgot...no one in the flds is actually 'claiming' any specific child...so permission to release their likeness is kind of a moot point.
Can’t you just read the article? It’s right up at the top.
Lawyer: Rebecca Flanigan,
The parents are not named, it just says “two mothers”.
The children are not named, it just says their ages.
There is nothing in this article saying that THIS family has petitioned the court for a hearing on their own children.
The state is supposed to hold these hearings, but instead of doing one for each parent, they held a mass hearing. IT is the state’s job to hold the hearing, the parents don’t have to petition for it.
When the state did their hearing, they advertised to “each parent’ using public notices.
you seem to want to keep swerving from what the law says, and what would be the right thing to do, into a unimportant question about whether you have the names of a specific parent and their lawyer.
I will simply now repeat my original statement.
If the state had held individual hearings for all the families that were identifiable as individual families, it would have made things better, and raised fewer concerns that the state was unfairly smearing all the families with the same broad brush rather than dealing with each case on it’s own merits.
The state had excuses, and a lot here have their own excuses as well, as to why this was unrealistic.
But the stories we read identify that there are specific families that were intact, monogamous, and did not have any specific allegations of abuse.
Those families deserved a specific hearing before an impartial judge, where the evidence against them was presented and the judge ruled what was best for the child.
That certainly would take more than 3 minutes per child that was given at the mass hearing (400+ children, 21 hours total).
I hope you can tell the difference between ME claiming that the court should have held specific hearings, and your response asking what PARENT requested a specific hearing.
“...the pleasures of eating chips and cupcakes and drinking soda and watching 15-year-olds having sex on TV.”
To each his own. We don’t do any of those things in our home.
Absolute truth, the real mothers went with their babies and the others that had any sense went to a shelter.
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