Documents: Sect married girls at puberty

By MICHELLE ROBERTS, Associated Press Writer
Wed Apr 9, 1 hour, 14 minutes ago


ELDORADO, Texas - A polygamist compound with hundreds of children was rife with sexual abuse, child welfare officials allege in court documents, with girls spiritually married to much older men as soon as they reached puberty and boys groomed to perpetuate the cycle.


The documents released Tuesday also gave details about the hushed phone calls that

triggered the raid, by a 16-year-old girl at the West Texas ranch who said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. Days after raiding the compound, officials still aren't sure where the girl is.

Officials have completed removing all 416 children from the ranch and have won custody of all of them, Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner told reporters in San Angelo, about 40 miles from the compound in Eldorado.

Court documents said a number of teen girls at the 1,700-acre compound were pregnant, and that all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of "emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse." Another 139 women left on their own.

"Investigators determined that there is a widespread pattern and practice of the (Yearn for Zion) Ranch in which young, minor female residents are conditioned to expect and accept sexual activity with adult men at the ranch upon being spiritually married to them," read the affidavit signed by Lynn McFadden, a Department of Family and Protective Services investigative supervisor.

McFadden said the girls were spiritually married to the men as soon as they reached puberty and were required to produce children.

Patrick Peranteau, lawyer for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment Tuesday.

An unknown number of men and women church members were at the ranch while authorities completed the search of the gleaming 80-foot-high temple, a cheese-making plant, a cement plant, a school, a doctor's office and housing units. Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, said Tuesday the adults were not being held, but if they left the compound, they could not return while the search continued.

At least two FBI agents were seen entering the back entrance of the temple on Tuesday.

Spokesmen for the FBI and DPS declined to comment.

The compound was raided Thursday after the 16-year-old girl called a local family violence shelter March 29 and 30, using someone else's cell phone and speaking in hushed tones to avoid being overheard, McFadden's affidavit said.

The girl said she was not allowed to leave the compound unless she was ill. She told the shelter that her husband would "beat and hurt" her when he got angry, including hitting her in the chest and choking her while another woman in the house held her baby.

The girl also said her husband sexually assaulted her, and that she was several weeks pregnant. The girl told the shelter her husband went to "the outsiders' world" but didn't know where.

Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for church member Dale Barlow, who is believed to be in Arizona, but the girls' husband is not identified in the court documents released Tuesday.

In the March 30 call, the girl told the shelter she was being held against her will. If she left, church members told her, "outsiders will hurt her, force her to cut her hair, to wear makeup and (modern) clothes and to have sex with lots of men."

At the end of the call, she began to cry.

Meisner said the agency still didn't know whether the 16-year-old was among the children removed from the ranch. Child welfare officials have been interviewing the children in search of the girl and to investigate allegations of abuse.

Investigators said some of the children were unwilling or unable to provide the names of their biological parents or identified multiple mothers.

The boys were groomed to be ready to marry underage girls upon adulthood and engage in sexual activity, "resulting in them becoming sexual perpetrators," the affidavit said.

Children in the sect were deprived of food and forced to sit in closed closets as a form of discipline, the affidavit said.

Former members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints predicted an uneasy adjustment to foster care. The children are likely the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of those taken by Arizona authorities 54 years ago in a similar raid.

That raid a half-century ago and the one this week pulled children of polygamist families from the only community and culture they'd ever known — an event that decades later a former community member recalls as traumatizing.

"It was total misery for them," said Ben Bistline, now 72. He was 18 when authorities raided the remote community of Short Creek — now known as the twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah. Authorities took 200 children into custody as part of an effort to wipe out a "nest of polygamy."

Bistline, who is now a Mormon, was not rounded up in the 1953 raid, but the woman he married later in life was 15 when she and her seven siblings were shipped to Phoenix, pulled from the friends and family who constituted their whole world. Nearly two years passed before they were allowed to return, he said.

Most of the current sect members are descended from families from the Arizona-Utah community. The sect broke away from the Mormon church after the latter disavowed polygamy more than a century ago.

The 1953 Short Creek raid also changed the community, said Carolyn Jessop, the former wife of the man believed to be running the Eldorado compound.

The distinct pioneer-style dresses, worn over long underwear year-round and sewn by the women, became part of the dress code after the 1953 raid as each generation added more restrictions, said Jessop, who left the community five years ago.

Despite the new hardships for the children and women in Texas, Bistline said the raid is appropriate if children are being forced into marriages.

"This situation in Texas is a justifiable raid," he said.

But an FLDS member now living in the Texas Panhandle, Samuel Fischer, had a different view.

"It's religious persecution," said Fischer, who moved to a ranch near Lockney with his two wives and 12 of his children from Hildale, Utah, last year.

The Texas investigation is the state's first with FLDS, but prosecutors in Utah and Arizona have pursued several church members in recent years, including sect leader Warren Jeffs, who is serving two consecutive sentences of five years to life for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old wed to her cousin in Utah. He awaits trial on other charges in Arizona.

Authorities investigating the Eldorado compound have described FLDS members as cooperative, but the house-by-house search of the temple, factories and living quarters has triggered some trouble.

On Monday, 41-year-old Leroy Johnson Steed was arrested on charges of felony tampering with evidence — a day after 19-year-old Levi Barlow Jeffs was arrested on misdemeanor charges of interfering with the duties of a public servant, said DPS spokesman Tom Vinger.

He declined to give details on the arrests or how Levi Barlow Jeffs might be related to the FLDS leader.

Attorneys for the church and church leaders have filed motions asking a judge to quash the search on constitutional grounds, saying state authorities didn't have enough evidence and that the warrants were too broad. A hearing on their motion was scheduled for Wednesday in San Angelo.

___

Associated Press writer Betsey Blaney contributed to this report from Lockney and Associated Press photographer Tony Gutierrez contributed to this report from Eldorado.

Source: Yahoo News



Polygamist compound raid nets 401 children, 133 women
AFP - Wednesday, April 9

ELDORADO, Texas (AFP) - - Texas state authorities have removed more than 400 children from the secluded, sprawling compound of a polygamist sect, amid allegations of widespread sexual and physical abuse.

The tally could rise as authorities search the 1,700 acre (688 hectare) ranch owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, led by jailed Warren Jeffs, who is considered the sect's prophet.

A judge has ordered every child removed from the ranch because they were deemed at imminent risk of harm.

Some 133 women dressed in ankle-length dresses voluntarily left the compound with the children. Most were mothers.

"I can't speculate on what those women are feeling," said Marleigh Meisner, spokeswoman for Texas Child Protective Services, which is conducting the probe.

More than 200 CPS workers were brought into the small town of Eldorardo, Texas to conduct one-on-one interviews.

"You can imagine this is a whole new world for them and we're trying to be sensitive to that," Meisner told a press conference.

Meisner would not describe what type of abuse allegedly took place on the ranch but said a judge determined there was sufficient evidence to order all 401 children into temporary state custody.

Court hearings will be held in the next two weeks to determine whether the children should be permanently taken from their parents.

"There were allegations of physical abuse, allegations that these children were at risk of harm," she said.

In court filings Monday lawyers for the religious sect asked for a restraining order against the state, called the raid unconstitutional and an "irreparable" desecration of the group's way of life.

The women and children were temporarily housed in an old Army fort that is now a museum in the nearby town of San Angelo, as state resources were stretched to the limit to accommodate the unprecedented case.

The children have lived a life devoid of popular culture, one in which the outside world is considered evil, people familiar with the sect said.

In assigning case workers and potential foster families, "they're going to need a lot of people that understand their culture and history," said Sam Brower, a private investigator who has visited the secluded compound.

"They're trying to communicate with people that have lived out their lives in a cave, basically -- very, very isolated," he said.

One person was arrested and charged with interfering with the "duties of a public servant," the Texas Department of Public Safety said, but no other charges have yet been filed.

State police sealed off the compound and would not allow the men to leave, although they have been conducting their search with care in order to ease tensions.

"We have tried very hard to be sensitive to the folks at the ranch," said DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange.

More than 80 people were killed, including 22 children, in a botched 1993 raid on a religious compound in Waco, Texas.

The operation began Thursday after authorities received a call from a 16-year-old girl who said she had been sexually and physically abused and had given birth to a child fathered by her 50-year-old husband.

Authorities have not yet identified the girl among those bused off the ranch.

Tensions rose on Saturday when church members blocked authorities from searching their temple in an hours-long standoff, but police were eventually allowed in without incident.

The YFZ (Yearn For Zion) ranch, 255 miles (411 kilometers) southwest of Dallas, Texas, is linked to Jeffs, an avowed polygamist who is now behind bars.

Jeffs was arrested near Las Vegas in 2006 and jailed for life for being an accomplice to rape. He also faces federal charges in Arizona and Utah.

The vast Texas ranch was bought by the sect in 2003 and has been kept under surveillance by the authorities. It has about 30 to 35 residential buildings -- some as large as 32,000 square feet (2,973 square meters) -- and another 30 outbuildings.

The mainstream Mormon church -- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- renounced polygamy more than a century ago as a price of Utah's admission to the United States.

It now excommunicates members who engage in the practice and disavows any connection with the FLDS church.

Members of the FLDS church are known to live in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, South Dakota and British Columbia.


Source: Yahoo News


Why are females always the victim of those jerks?? Why are there always jerks around the world??? >_<

Labels: News