Sect kids reunited with parents
2008-06-04 17:10
Eldorado - Families from a polygamist sect began trickling back to the Yearning For Zion Ranch exactly two months after child welfare authorities and law enforcement first arrived at its battered metal gate looking for a caller to a domestic abuse hot line.
"We're sure grateful to be home," said Zavenda Young, whose three-year-old daughter clung to her while her three sons, aged five to nine, stood nearby. "They can't believe it, for sure. Even though we drove all night, they hardly slept."
The children seized from the west Texas ranch in April had been sent to foster care facilities across the state, so many families faced treks of hundreds of kilometres.
Willie Jessop, an elder with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, said some families were cautious about bringing children back to the spread they last saw when police clad in body armour raided the ranch's homes, school and temple, looking for evidence of underage girls pressed into marriage and sex.
"This is the scene of the crime, and the crime is not how they lived. It's how they were taken out of here," Jessop said.
The Texas Supreme Court ruled last week that the state overreached in the massive custody case by taking all children from the ranch when evidence of sexual abuse was limited to a few teenage girls.
"There were victims on the property"
Even as families returned to the ranch, Sheriff David Doran said he believes the raid was handled appropriately and he expects some members to face criminal charges.
"This needed to be done. There was an outcry for help. There were crimes being uncovered. There were victims on the property," he said on Tuesday, predicting indictments in the next several months.
Parents began picking up their children on Monday after a judge, bowing to the high court's ruling, signed an order returning roughly 430 children to their parents.
Child Protective Services officials said 229 went home the first day, and many more were expected to be picked up on Tuesday.
The state removed all children from the ranch after a raid prompted by calls to a domestic abuse hot line that purportedly came from a 16-year-old mother who was being abused by her middle-age husband. The calls are now being investigated as a hoax.
The state agency claimed all the children were at risk because church officials pushed underage girls into marriage and sex. An appeals court and the Supreme Court, however, said the state failed to show any more than five teenage girls had been sexually abused and offered no evidence of abuse of the other children.
The agency plans to continue its investigation.
Texas authorities last week collected DNA from Warren Jeffs as part of investigation into underage sex with girls, ages 12 to 15, at the ranch. He has been convicted in Utah as an accomplice to rape and is jail in Arizona awaiting trial on similar charges.
- AP