Posted on 04/23/2008 1:30:49 PM PDT by Between the Lines
Colorado Springs, CO and Eldorado, TX - This is not the first time Rozita Swinton has made up a good story and called authorities. But it’s definitely the first time one of Swinton’s calls produced a mass raid on over 400 people. Swinton, 33, is now facing charges related to the April 3 raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, owned and occupied by members of Warren Jeffs’ Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints. Rozita Swinton may have set the whole raid off by calling a San Angelo crisis center on March 29, saying she was a young girl named Sarah who was being abused.
Rozita Swinton is a soft-spoken young woman with what police call “a baby voice”. She’s her neighborhood delegate to the Obama campaign. She is single, without children, pays her bills and works for an insurance company. By all accounts, she is a giving person, allowing her roommate to move in after the Eldorado raid had begun. But Swinton has called in false reports before, tying up police and social resources for weeks at a time.
In June 2005, Swinton was arrested in Castle Rock, Colorado after she called an adoption agency posing a teenaged pregnant girl. Swinton told the agency and police that she was young, pregnant, alone and thinking of killing herself after leaving the baby at a fire station. There was no baby. There was no teenager. There was only Rozita Swinton, who had no explanation for what she’d done. Police charged her with filing a false police report, and she is on probation for that case.
In February of this year, a swarm of Colorado Springs police officers went out looking for a thirteen-year-old who said she was locked in a basement. Nope - it was Rozita Swinton again. That case is still pending.
Flora Jessop, a former FLDS member who escaped and now runs a crisis center, says that Swinton repeatedly called her posing as a young abused girl. Jessop said she first got a call March 30 (the day after the San Angelo hotline call) from Swinton, who said she was an abuse victim named Sarah. Swinton had done her research, but missed a few key points over the 30-50 hours of phone conversations Jessop taped. And the man Sarah claimed was her husband is a well-known polygamist FLDS member who doesn’t live at the Eldorado compound at all. That was one of several clues that led authorities to Swinton’s door.
Is Rozita Swinton a wingnut, or a misguided angel of mercy trying to save the abused children of the FLDS? Investigators are still looking for Sarah, on the off-chance that she does exist. But Texas Rangers have already been to Colorado, where they found books and “items of interest” in Swinton’s apartment. The hotline call has been traced and appears to come from Swinton. On the other hand, there is evidence of prolonged and ritualized sexual abuse on the Yearning For Zion compound, even down to a marital bed in the temple itself and many minor children who are pregnant or have had babies by much older relatives. Rozita Swinton may be a nutball. She may also have saved over 400 lives.
Heroine or criminal or both, Swinton remains under investigation by multiple agencies today. She is charged with false reporting in Colorado and may be facing probation violation charges and other charges as well. I don’t know what I think about this one - what do you think?
ANY licensed physician is, by law, considered to be COMPETENT.... even serial abortionists.
I do believe you owe wideawake an apology.
Welcome back.
Again, Lincoln was dead.
But do you really believe that Lincoln, once the Confederacy was dismantled, would have permitted the LDS to run a US federal territory as a theocracy and continue to flaunt its disregard of federal law?
Lincoln's vice-president was of one mind with Lincoln on the matter of enforcement of federal authority and he moved against LDS usurpation of federal power.
His successor - US Grant - completed the job of returning the Utah territory to federal authority. Do you think Lincoln thought that Grant, his handpicked general and the champion of his unconditional surrender policy, had the wrong ideas about insurrectionists?
Had Lincoln lived, he would not have allowed one religious sect to usurp federal authority in federal territory.
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Interesting, considering the charges against them.
Just wait. People will get more hysterical as time goes on if one can imagine it. I call it the Nancy Grace mob.
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I used to feel that way too. But five of them are young adults & Sassy is only 8 years old & I just would have to say over my dead body would NJ DYFS take her. She is far too bright & will make a wonderful FReeper one day. Glad to see you are back! ~Pandy~
That is good point. I was wondering how they got away with the polygamy thing when law forbids it. Just peruse the internet a bit and you find all kinds of polygamy in different forms everywhere - religion aside of course. Clinton comes to mind lol.
Colofornian,
You can get off your high horse now. My point is not that polygamy shoud be legalized or even to justify it. You never answered my question? How can our society ignore Adultery (which is illegal) and prosecute polygamy — especially when the polygamists involved all know about it. In both cases the first marriage is being savaged and I would suggest that a case can be made that adultery has even worse social consequences (more broken homes, juvenile diliquents from single parent households etc).
The only reason I can see that society is interested in prosecuting bigamy and polygamy (in these cases where all are willing participants) is because it is a part of a religion.
And don’t give me the underage bit — the underage thing is a different law that I was not even attempting to address.
“I do not fear the govt coming in & taking my child.”
Perhaps your neighbors will decide you are a little strange for home-schooling and make one anonomous phone call to the CPS — then we will see if you still hold the position above.
The very people who cause fumarase deficiency through their incestuous inbreeding.
Link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2005578/posts
I am unsure why you brought up Catholics but oh well.
The question was “why is wideawake a liar?”
He said lds alow abortion with deformed babies - that is true.
You said lds allow abortions with deformed babies - that is true.
Lds allow abortion with deformed babies - that is true.
Now you wished to clarify the policy “allow” fine but what wideawke said is true.
I believe you’re wrong.
Your tagline is very appropriate. Just keep “substituting your own reality.”
Thats just Mormonism, Mitt Romney could tell us all about it.
What the hell is wrong with you people?
Cute.
But it still does not give answer to the question, “why is wideawke a liar?”
Even if that were true - so? Does that justify the killing of babies?
No answer I see to the 24 hr manned guard tower huh? Or to the parents who are fleeing the ranch so they don't have to give DNA samples? Or to the abuse of babies & children having children. Nor to to the fact families are ripped away from their fathers & given to new men? Why not answer my questions? No answers? Why not?
Take my child & I would comply with whatever they asked of me not abandon my child & flee. Seems strange to me that any loving normal parent would do so!
Did I ever use the term, “liar”?
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