San Angelo, USA - For nearly two months, Texas child welfare officials had insisted conditions at a polygamist group's ranch were so abusive that none of its members should be allowed to keep their children.
Now, however, one of the of the largest custody cases in U.S. history is unraveling, and some are looking for what went wrong when the state raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch and removed more than 400 children.
Since the state Supreme Court ruled that the Texas Department of Child Protective Services overreached when it swept the children into foster care, agency officials have been unwilling to discuss the case. However, some close to it say the operation was doomed from the start by a series of missteps.
First is the oddity of a religious sect the agency knew little about, exacerbating the inherent perils of balancing parents' rights and child safety. Then there were the abuse allegations, starting with a mysterious telephone call and echoed by disgruntled former members, seemingly accepted at face value.
And an ill-fated 1992 brush with another religious sect -- which led to the fiery deaths of 21 children at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco -- still lingers on the agency's collective conscience.
"It's difficult to know whether, in fact, they screwed it up," said Linda Spears, vice president of the Child Welfare League of America, a national collection of nonprofit groups that aid abused and neglected children. "It's the 20/20 hindsight thing."
Folks in Schleicher County, near the middle of Texas, had been at least curious about, if not suspicious of, members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway from the Mormon Church whose members believe polygamy earns glorification in heaven.
Sheriff David Doran cultivated a confidential informant to monitor the group's activities, and former FLDS members recounted abuse and forced marriages to anyone who would listen.
Investigators "listened to a lot of misinformation and allowed themselves to be kind of captivated by these anti-FLDS people," said FLDS spokesman Rod Parker.
When someone purporting to be a pregnant 16-year-old called a domestic abuse hotline claiming her middle-age husband beat her, authorities went in with Child Protective Services workers on April 3. But the calls may have been a hoax.
"We had no choice but to treat those calls as credible. If we had not treated them as credible, and something bad happened, people would be very upset," said Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, which is still investigating possible sexual abuse at the ranch in addition to the origin of the hotline calls.
Although caseworkers said when they took custody of all the children that the sect was forcing underage girls into marriage and sex and training boys to be adult perpetrators, only a few dozen of the children turned out to be teenage girls, and a handful had children or were pregnant.
David Schenck, an attorney for some of the mothers, said CPS workers were confronted with a decision when they arrived at the ranch: identify all the men who might be suspected abusers or grab all the children.
"They were interested in taking care of kids, but the problem is they took on more than the evidence is going to support," he said.
Spears, a caseworker turned advocate, said the dilemma faced by CPS is little different than in most removal cases. "At the time you walk in, you have very little information even in the best cases," she said.