By KIRK JOHNSON and GRETEL C. KOVACH
SAN ANGELO, Tex. — More than 460 children seized by state authorities in April in an investigation of possible sexual abuse at an isolated West Texas polygamist community began going home on Monday.
The case, one of the largest custody disputes in United States history, tied the Texas child welfare system in knots and became the focus of a national debate over the limits of police power.
State officials announced the release, under a court order signed by a district judge here in Tom Green County, with an arch, if not quite reluctant, formality and said the story was far from over.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Family and Protective Services, Marleigh Meisner, said the investigation into possible sexual abuse would continue. The judge in the case also imposed a lengthy list of caveats pending the conclusion of the investigation, including surprise home visits by caseworkers, possible psychiatric evaluations of the children and a ban on travel outside Texas.
“We hope they can be safe,” Ms. Meisner said in a statement outside the courthouse. “We continue to have concerns.”
But for the parents, the children and their caregivers in the foster care system, it was a day for tears — of joy at the reunification, or of bittersweet sadness at the parting.
At the High Sky Children’s Ranch in Midland, where 15 girls from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ages 11 to 17, had been staying, the children all donned identical navy blue dresses they had sewn themselves.
“This is their way of celebrating,” said Jackie Carter, executive director of the shelter. “They’re all hugging and happy, but I’m sad because I’m going to miss them — they’ve been very delightful to know.”
At an emergency shelter in Liverpool, about an hour from Houston, where 24 small children were held, some of the youngest children cried at the separation from shelter workers.
“They’ve bonded with some of the caregivers, and there were tears from the caregivers also — tears all around,” said Estella Olguin, a spokeswoman for Child Protective Services in the Houston region, who was there for the release process, which state officials said could take until Friday across the state. “Most of the children are very young — they’re toddlers — so they don’t really know what’s going on.”
Confusion has been a constant in the case, ever since state officials took action on April 3 — prompted, they said, by a call to an abuse hotline from a girl who said that she was 16 and that her 49-year-old husband was abusing her. The girl was never found or identified.
Two court rulings last month — including one from the state’s highest judicial panel — criticized the Department of Family and Protective Services, concluding that the seizure order had been too broad, and that a threat to the safety of all the children in the group’s compound, called the Yearning for Zion ranch, in Eldorado, could not be proved.
The release order issued on Monday was hammered out over the weekend and signed by Judge Barbara Walther of the District Court. It seemed to please no one entirely.
On Friday, Judge Walther walked out of her courtroom in frustration as lawyers for some families argued that she had no rights to impose restrictions on the release.
Her final order, which lawyers said was put together by the judge herself from three different drafts agreed to by various parties, required that every parent from the sect take child-rearing classes and said any interference with the state’s investigation would violate the court order.
Some lawyers for the families said the open-ended nature of the order — it has no expiration date — might mean that at some point another court process will be needed for a final resolution. Others criticized the judge’s inclusion of psychiatric examinations.
But one member of the sect, Willie Jessop, speaking to reporters outside the courthouse here, as a hot wind whipped the trees on a day pushing 100 degrees, said that the settlement was flawed, but that half a loaf was good enough.
“We wish it was a better order,” Mr. Jessop said, “but hey, it gets the children and the mothers back, so we’ll take it.”
In a news conference at the Zion ranch late Monday, Mr. Jessop said his sect would now formally forbid any girl to marry if she was under the legal consent age in the state where she lives.
For the sect, the repercussions will certainly continue. Many members, for example, do not plan on going back to the ranch, founded in 2003 after the group moved from its historic base in Arizona and Utah. The sect broke off from the mainstream Mormon church decades ago over polygamy, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints disavowed in 1890.
“The children’s last memory of the ranch is of it being raided,” said Cynthia Martinez, a spokeswoman for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, which represents 48 mothers in the case. “That’s a very scary memory.”
Another lawyer said the families she represented had decided that a separate residence was the best legal strategy to convince the state of their good child-rearing skills and willingness to protect their children.
“Gaining independent housing may be part of that process,” said Laura Shockley, a lawyer in Dallas who represents three children and three adults seized in the raid.
Tim Edwards, a San Angelo lawyer representing four mothers, said his clients probably would not be able to get their children until Tuesday because of logistics — the children are in Amarillo, Midland, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Gonzales. “They are scattered to the four winds,” Mr. Edwards said.
But at least one group home, the Austin Children’s Shelter, had emptied out entirely by day’s end. At 8 a.m., the shelter had 19 sect members in its care — 6 adult mothers and 13 children. As vehicles pulled up through the morning and afternoon, shelter workers spread 10-foot-by-10-foot blue tarps around the vehicles to protect the children’s and mother’s identities. Then the vehicles drove away.
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"In a news conference at the Zion ranch late Monday, Mr. Jessop said his sect would now formally forbid any girl to marry if she was under the legal consent age in the state where she lives."
ReplyDeleteThose abusive cult leaders just don't get it. This is what all cult leaders do, they blame their victims. As if they have to forbid under age girls from marrying men decades older than them! It's not girls under the legal age who are begging to marry old perverts. It's the pedophilic patriarchs who, in the name of perverted religion, force them to marry men old enough to be their grand-fathers, or their relatives. What Jessop should be saying is that they will forbid the men from marrying children. But those cult creeps will never see it that way, since they believe it is their god-given right. They have not suddenly abandoned their cherished religious dogma. They are only pretending to go along with the system in order to get their children back so they can keep indoctrinating and abusing them. I'm willing to bet that history will repeat itself and that many of those children will eventually be trafficked away to some other jurisdiction where they will continue to be abused in isolation away from any government oversight.