By Brooke Adams and Kristen Moulton
Salt Lake Tribune
April 19, 2008
http://origin.sltrib.com/ci_8981942
SAN ANGELO, Texas - In a swift end to a trying, emotional hearing, a Texas judge said Friday night that 416 children are better off in state custody than with their parents, who belong to a controversial polygamous sect.
If the parents are ever to get their children back, they will have to provide a safe environment, 51st District Judge Barbara Walther told about 75 mothers and fathers of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
The Texas Child Protective Services used just four witnesses to persuade the judge that a polygamous community where underage girls sometimes marry is a threat to all children.
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| FLDS members and attorneys react to a Friday decision by the 51st District Judge Barbara Walther to keep all 416 children who were removed from Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, in state custody. Photo by Trent Nelson |
Eldorado and five years after the FLDS, based on the Utah-Arizona border, expanded to western Texas.
CPS spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner said the department will move fast to place the children in foster homes or in customized arrangements as recommended by a psychiatrist who told the judge traditional foster care would be "destructive." She added that children will be placed with relatives only if appropriate.
FLDS women sat motionless inside Walther's courtroom as she issued her ruling. Afterward, they huddled with attorneys, listening as the decision was explained, somber but showing no anger.
Inside the City Hall auditorium one block away, several parents watching
a video feed of the courtroom dropped their heads and walked out, one by one, after the ruling. Richard, an FLDS father of seven children in custody who declined to provide his last name, said: "It's just a continuation of a bad thing."
Another FLDS father who asked not to be identified said, "Every parent in America ought to go home and hug their kids in case CPS comes into Photo Gallery
Just before the final, brief arguments from attorneys, four FLDS women, two of them in monogamous marriages, told the judge they are willing to do anything, even leave the YFZ Ranch, to get their children back.
Linda Musser, 56 and divorced, said she was in Lubbock with her hospitalized adult daughter when the authorities raided the ranch two weeks ago, taking her 13-year-old son into custody.
She told the judge she will move, probably to Lubbock, if she can regain custody. "Whatever they need of me, I would do to the best of my abilities."
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| 51st District Judge Barbara Walther, center, arrives at 51st District Court on Friday, surrounded by security. Photo by Trent Nelson |
Other young mothers described the ranch as a peaceful, prayerful and wholesome home for their children. But they said they would get jobs and leave their husbands if it meant reuniting with their children.
One, 29-year-old Merilyn Jeffs, said she would never allow her daughter, now 7, to marry before age 18 - even if it meant defying her prophet, Warren S. Jeffs.
A CPS investigator, the key witness for the state, described the FLDS women as compliant and obedient to their spiritual leaders and thus unfit to protect their children.
The culture, Angie Voss said, turns boys into perpetrators and girls into sexual-assault victims.
After the ruling, CPS spokeswoman Meisner said she was "very, very pleased" with the judge's decision, which she said was about protecting the children and not about religion.
Meisner said phone calls to a domestic violence hot line from a teenage girl named Sarah, which triggered the raid, became immaterial when investigators found evidence of sexual and physical abuse. CPS has not identified the girl, and authorities have questioned a Colorado woman who may have made the call.
But Meisner essentially described Sarah as a metaphor.
"I do believe that Sarah exists," she said. "If you listen to the testimony, there were many Sarahs. We received information who were young Sarahs who were pregnant, Sarahs who were mothers. Just because perhaps someone else phoned that in really doesn't change the investigation because we believe what we found was systematic abuse."
Attorneys from around the state, volunteering their time to represent the children and their parents, left the Tom Green County Courthouse grim-faced. For two days, they had pressed the state to prove that all 416 were at risk of abuse.
"I heard no imminent danger to the 2-year-old boys I represent," one said during the hearing Friday. If the men marrying teenagers are generally in their 40s, he said, his clients won't be "perpetrators" for four more decades.
Prior to her ruling, Walther described the difficulty of her task.
"This is the hardest, toughest decision a judge makes every day," she said. "It's no easy decision to rip families apart."
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| FLDS women at the 51st District Courthouse are somber but show no anxiety waiting for the judge's decision on Friday. Photo by Trent Nelson |
Walther told the parents they must work with Texas CPS and advised them she is able to restrict or even terminate their parental rights.
The judge also ordered maternity and paternity testing of both mothers and fathers. A mobile unit will be used to collect DNA samples from the children on Monday and from parents on Tuesday, Walther said.
The judge rejected attorneys' requests for any concessions - for cell phones to be returned to teenage boys so they could call their mothers, for a mother staying with a small child in one building to cross a parking lot to see an 8-year-old in an adjacent shelter.
Earlier Friday, psychiatrist Bruce Perry of Texas testified for the state, saying the FLDS culture is dangerous to children because teenage girls are not emotionally mature enough for marriage.
The other children, he said, are at risk because their brain development could be impeded by an authoritarian atmosphere that discourages independent thinking.
Perry said there are many healthy aspects to the FLDS culture, but still recommended continued state custody. "This is just a lose-lose deal. There is no great way to make this come out."
Perry worked with children from the Branch Davidian sect, which was decimated in a 1993 FBI raid that killed 76 people, 21 of them children.
Besides the FLDS women, the only witness for the parents was William John Walsh, a Mormon scholar who said he has studied the FLDS religion for 18 years. He said it is not part of the sect's doctrine or scripture for teenage girls to marry, nor does it occur in many families.
Rod Parker, a Salt Lake City attorney and the families' spokesman, said families across America should be "outraged by what's happened to these poor children. If the state can come in and take away their children on the basis of their religious beliefs and practice, then no one is safe."
San Angelo attorney Guy Choate said CPS will work with the parents to come up with "family plans" for each child. By June 5, each child will have an individual hearing to determine whether parents regain custody and under which conditions, he said.
Judge Walther, he said, is likely to appoint judges throughout the state to help her with the hundreds of hearings.
One attorney representing two children, ages 8 and 9, left the auditorium in tears.
"I just feel sorry for the parents, and I feel sorry for the children," said Deborah Cascino, a family lawyer.
Whether the judge made the right ruling, she said, "only time will tell."
Contact: brooke@sltrib.com, kmoulton@sltrib.com.
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