More Children From Texas Polygamy Sect Reunited With Happy Parents

ELDORADO, Texas (AP) – Polygamist sect families began trickling back to the Yearning For Zion Ranch on Tuesday – exactly two months after child welfare authorities and law enforcement first arrived at the battered metal gate looking for a caller to a domestic abuse hotline.

Willie Jessop, an elder with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, said a few families with children had already returned to the ranch, though he was unsure how many.

Others were expected, but some families were cautious about returning children to the 1,700-acre spread they last saw when police clad in body armor raided the homes, school and temple looking for evidence of underage girls pressed into marriage and sex.

Even those who planned to return immediately faced treks over hundreds of miles between foster facilities scattered across the state.

“It’s a long journey back,” Jessop said.

Parents began picking up their children on Monday after a judge, bowing to a Texas Supreme Court ruling, signed an order returning roughly 430 children to their parents.

Child Protective Services officials said 229 went home the first day, and many more were expected to be picked up Tuesday, though Jessop predicted the last children may not be reunited with parents for another day or so.

“Everybody is trying really hard to be patient and considerate,” he said. “We know more and more are leaving every hour.”

At foster facilities in Amarillo, Fort Worth and outside San Antonio, mothers in their now-familiar prairie dresses, arrived to retake custody of their children. Most refused to comment to waiting reporters.

Seth Jeffs, the 35-year-old brother of jailed FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs, arrived on Tuesday to pick up three sons, ages 8-12, at a boys ranch in Amarillo. He said the boys received good care at the facility.

But asked if they had anything to say, the boys shook their heads. “They’re glad to be going home,” their father said.

The families will not be allowed to leave Texas under the order signed by Judge Barbara Walther, and parents will have to attend parenting classes and allow children to be examined as part of any abuse investigation.

They are not required to renounce polygamy, though Jessop on Monday said the church would refuse to sanction marriages of any FLDS members who were not of legal age. He insisted the marriages have always been consensual.

CPS removed all the children from the ranch, claiming all the children were at risk because church teachings pushed underage girls into marriage and sex. An appellate court and the Supreme Court found the state overreached in its seizure of all the children, since it failed to show any more than five teenage girls had been sexually abused and offered no evidence of abuse of the other children.

The agency plans to continue its investigation.

It has backed off earlier claims that it couldn’t determine which children belong to which parents, but DNA test results ordered by Walther as a result were being sent to the court this week. All the results taken from swabs collected six weeks ago should be back by Friday, said Janece Rolfe, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office.

Whether those tests might be used as part of a criminal investigation is unclear, though Jessop said they were unfairly taken from FLDS members simply because they had children at the ranch.

“Why is it they need that information? What’s it going to be used for?” he said.

Walther’s custody order does not end a separate criminal investigation into possible abuse. Texas authorities last week collected DNA from Warren Jeffs as part of investigation into underage sex with girls, ages 12 to 15, at the ranch. He has been convicted in Utah as an accomplice to rape and is jail in Arizona awaiting trial on separate charges.

The FLDS, which believes polygamy brings glorification in heaven, is a breakaway sect of the Mormon church, which renounced polygamy more than a century ago.

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Associated Press writers Elizabeth White in Gonzales, Linda Ball in Fort Worth and Betsy Blaney in Amarillo, contributed to this report.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)