Tyler, USA - Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs is out of intensive care and in a "general hospital" bed, days after falling ill while fasting in a Texas prison, a state spokesman said Thursday.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark told CNN that Jeffs "is continuing to progress."
"He is no longer in ICU and is now being treated in a general hospital acute-care bed," Clark added.
Jeffs, leader of the 10,000-member Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is serving a life-plus-20-year sentence for sexual assault. He was convicted in early August of the aggravated sexual assaults of a 12-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl Jeffs claimed were his "spiritual wives."
The FLDS is a breakaway Mormon sect that openly practices polygamy in the border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, as well as on its Yearning For Zion ranch near Eldorado, Texas. The mainstream Mormon church renounced polygamy more than a century ago.
Jeffs, 55, was sent to East Texas Medical Center in Tyler, Texas, on Sunday night. He told officials at the Powledge prison unit, where he'd been incarcerated, that he was not on a hunger strike, but was "fasting," Clark said earlier.
"While he definitely is eating and drinking some, it just wasn't as much as he should," Clark said.
Jeffs was "responsive" and answering questions Tuesday when he was flown from the Tyler medical facility to a prison hospital in Galveston, Texas, the state spokesman said. Three hours after Jeffs arrived in Galveston, doctors upgraded his condition from critical to serious condition.
Department spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said earlier that Jeffs is expected to make a full recovery. In addition to not eating, she said, Jeffs had "bigger issues that required medical attention." Lyons could not elaborate because of inmate privacy rules.