Eldorado, USA - Police carried automatic weapons, wore body armor and were supported by an armored personnel vehicle during their raid on a west Texas polygamist compound, new photographs released by the group’s members to The Associated Press show.
Sect members took the photos during the first few days of a seven-day raid, during which state autorties took more than 400 children into state custody, according to the AP.
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints spokesman Rod Parker said the group did not offer any resistance to the force mustered against them, which included police agencies from six counties, the Texas Rangers, the state highway patrol and wildlife officers.
“Instead they responded by singing and praying,” he told the AP.
The release of the photos comes shortly after state officials defended their decision to separate many of the children from their mothers.
At a news conference today, Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner said she believed the children in state custody had been physically or sexually abused or were at risk of being abused.
“This was not a safe environment for those children,” she said of the Yearning For Zion Ranch.
She also said the children would be more likely to tell investigators the truth “when they don’t have a parent there coaching them.”
The 416 children, most of whom are staying in the San Angelo coliseum, were followed by 139 mothers until Monday, when state officials forced all of the women who had children over the age of 5 to leave.
The women were given the choice of either returning to the ranch or going to what Meisner described as a “safe place.” Six women opted not to return to the FLDS compound, Meisner said.
More than two dozen teenage boys taken from the polygamist sect have been shipped 400 miles away to a ranch for troubled boys and girls, the state confirmed to ABC News today.
The revelation came a day after the distraught mothers of 416 children taken by Texas officials from the polygamist group pleaded to be reunited with their kids.
The women were forcibly separated from their children after the kids were moved from a cramped shelter to the San Angelo Coliseum, a sports facility, on Monday.
ABC News has learned that the court with jurisdiction over the massive child custody battle authorized 27 of the boys to be transferred Monday night to Cal Farley’s Ranch for Boys and Girls.
The ranch, outside of Amarillo, is 400 miles away and about a seven hour drive from Eldorado, where the sect’s secretive Yearning for Zion Ranch is located.
Marleigh Meisner, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, confirmed the court order and said Cal Farley’s would be the boys’ temporary foster placement.
James Bradshaw, a lawyer for the parents, said the order cited 27 teenage boys.
“Obviously this is going to make it pretty difficult for them to meet with their lawyers,” he said. Each child in a custody case is entitled to a lawyer. Cal Farley’s Ranch, like the sect’s own ranch, is a self-contained town with its own medical facilities and school system. While the sect’s teenagers have lived a sheltered life away from what they called the “outsiders’ world,” Cal Farley’s describes itself as a place “where a troubled boy could be given a second chance,” according to the Cal Farley Web site.
Dan Adams, director of the Cal Farley ranch, told ABC News.com that the placement of 27 teens from an austere religious sect was “a little extraordinary.” He said the children usually sent to his ranch are in need of supervision. Mixing the two, he conceded, is “going to be difficult.”
The boys were shifted from a San Angelo shelter, about 30 miles from the sect’s West Texas ranch, about the same time a group of mothers made a tearful public appeal Monday night to be reunited with their children.
More than two dozen women who belong to the reclusive polygamous sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints gave the rare joint interview Monday night to condemn their forced removal from the makeshift shelter where their children are being cared for.
As many of them sobbed, several of the mothers told ABC News that they weren’t able to say goodbye to their children.
“All we want is our children back, clean and pure,” said a woman who identified herself as Sarah and said her five children were still in the state’s shelter.
“The last thing we have is our children.”
More than 20 women, dressed in ankle-length dresses, assembled outside what appeared to be living quarters built from wooden logs on their sprawling 1,700 acre compound, about a mile down a dirt road.
The state raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch last week and took the 416 children into custody on suspicion that they were being physically and sexually abused.
The state wants to strip parents of custody of their children.
Lawyers will begin to unravel what appears to be largest child custody case in U.S. history at a hearing later this week.
Carolyn Jessop, who escaped from the group five years ago with her eight children, was sympathetic to the mothers, but applauded the removal of the children’s mothers.
“It’s a difficult thing and my heart goes out to them. I can appreciate emotionally what they are going through,” Jessop told “Good Morning America” today.
She said, however, the authorities were right to move the mothers out. “The children would be way more apt to open up when the mothers aren’t there,” Jessop said.
State officials raided the compound beginning April 3 after they said they received a phone call from a 16-year-old girl who claimed her 50-year-old husband raped and beat her. All 416 children were taken into custody and 139 women voluntarily left the compound with their children.
Authorities have not located or identified the 16-year-old caller, who identified herself as Sarah, and women at the compound said Monday that no such person exists.
“That person does not exist on this land,” a woman who identified herself as Joy said. “This is a huge mistake.”
The women who spoke Monday insisted that their children had never been abused.
But, asked whether any girls in the sect had married older men when they were younger than 16, the women interviewed by ABC News declined to answer. “Nobody is forced into anything,” was all that a woman who identified herself as Mary would say.
“What’s happening now is the worst abuse that has ever happened to them,” said Esther, who said she had five children still in state custody.
The mothers and the children were moved by bus with a police escort from the shelter where they had been staying to the San Angelo Coliseum.
The Rev. Michael Pfeifer, bishop of San Angelo, who has toured the shelter, told ABC News the women and children repeatedly said they wanted to go home. Pfeifer said the conditions inside the shelter were cramped, with cots lined up close together and lots of women tending to infants.
Women at the ranch said they were told today that they were moving to a better facility. But, once they arrived at the coliseum, the women told ABC News that they were separated from their children and led into a room that was filled with police officers and child custody workers.
Only those with children younger than 5 were allowed to stay with them. The women said they were given a choice to return to their ranch or to go to a separate shelter.
“It’s so difficult to come back here without our children,” said a woman who identified herself as Mary. She said her two children, 6 and 8, were still in the shelter. “Our children are our lives.”
Rod Parker, a church lawyer, said there was a “huge amount” of mistrust between the FLDS families and state authorities, adding that some of the mothers who followed their children to the state shelters did not go to court today for fear that they would not be allowed to return to the shelters to see their children.
Several of the children have given investigators differing stories about who their parents are, attorneys told Walther.
Fearing that members of the sect remaining on the ranch would try to influence their testimony, on Sunday, the judge ordered mobile phones confiscated from the 100-plus mothers who accompanied children to the shelter.
Walther said that one of her priorities was to determine how many girls taken from the remote Yearning for Zion Ranch were underage mothers.
Bradshaw said the 60 or so men remaining at the ranch have offered to leave if the state will allow the women and children to return. He said he had not received a response and the state Children’s Protective Services agency said it had not yet seen the offer and had no comment on it, The Associated Press reported.
The mothers say their only priority now is to get their children back. Esther said her daughter, who turns 12 this month, was so upset when placed in the shelter that she began throwing up and stopped eating for several days.
“She was sick. She was so heartbroken,” she said. “We feel they are in danger.”