Sect’s children to stay in state care

A judge ruled Friday evening that 416 children seized by authorities during a raid on a polygamous sect’s compound are at risk of sexual abuse if they stay with the group and must remain in state care.

Texas District Judge Barbara L. Walther’s ruling came after a chaotic two-day hearing that featured several hundred lawyers and two buildings filled with witnesses, reporters and members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a sect that broke away from the Mormon Church in the 1930s. Its members believe in divinely inspired, polygamous marriage involving underage girls.

Walther ordered sect members to provide DNA samples for maternity and paternity tests. State witnesses testified that more than 20 of the children involved appeared to have been born to underage mothers. And authorities have said that it has been difficult to sort out family ties because the children have given vague answers since being taken into custody.

Individual hearings for each child will be held by June 5. The state has one year to prove the children are not in a safe environment and terminate their parents’ rights to raise them. It can seek a six-month extension in special circumstances.

“This is but the beginning,” Walther said.

Dressed in full-length dresses and sporting tightly plaited hair, some of the mothers bowed their heads as Walther issued her ruling, but they left the courthouse without comment.

“We’re obviously disappointed,” Tim Edwards, an attorney who represented four mothers, said outside the courthouse. “We’re going to do everything in our power to turn this situation around and put the children back with their parents.”

Earlier Friday, a state witness contended that the sect’s authoritarian culture made it hazardous to leave families intact. But FLDS mothers said they would do whatever it took to get their children back -- even leave the sect’s secluded ranch. No fathers testified.

“We’re a peaceful people and we love our children dearly,” said Lucille Nielson, 24, whose only son, Wendall, is 1 year old. “I plead with the judge to allow my son to remain with me.”

Before the ruling, evidence surfaced that the phone call that sparked the April 3 raid on the FLDS compound outside Eldorado, Texas, might have been a hoax. Authorities stormed the compound after receiving what they described as a call for help from a 16-year-old girl from the sect who said her husband was abusing her. Authorities did not find the girl or her husband, but took the 416 children after discovering what they said was evidence that the youths may have been subjected to abuse.

On Wednesday night, police in Colorado Springs, Colo., arrested Rozita Swinton, 33, for allegedly making false reports to authorities. Texas Rangers were present for the arrest. A judge has sealed all paperwork related to the case, and officials in Texas and Colorado would not say whether Swinton was linked to the FLDS raid.

Flora Jessop, a former sect member who helps girls who say they were abused, told ABC News on Thursday night that she received calls from a person claiming to be the 16-year-old in question. Jessop said that she recorded those calls and that authorities had traced them to Colorado Springs.

Swinton has a history of posing as girls in trouble. Last year, she pleaded guilty to making a false report to police in Castle Rock, a city south of Denver. In that case, she claimed she was a 16-year-old who wanted to give away her newborn son and kill herself.

Police thought she sounded like a teenager, said Douglas Ernst of the Castle Rock Police Department.

“They were quite surprised she was older. She was about 30 at the time. She did sound like a mid- to late-teen female,” he said.

Experts said that even if the initial call to Texas authorities was fraudulent, it would have no effect on the fate of the hundreds of children in state custody.

“The legal question is not whether the information the police rely on is correct, but whether they were reasonable in believing that they had cause to enter” the compound, said Sandra Guerra Thompson, a law professor at the University of Houston.

Shari Pulliam, a spokeswoman for Texas Child Protective Services, said that what led authorities to the ranch wasn’t important. What matters is that they found signs of abuse there, she said.

“We removed the children based on what we found at the ranch -- based on evidence we found of sexual abuse of young teen girls and a pattern of grooming these girls,” she said.

The leader of the FLDS, Warren Jeffs, was convicted last year in Utah of being an accomplice to rape after ordering a 14-year-old girl to marry her 18-year-old cousin. He faces similar charges in Arizona. The FLDS base is on the border of the two states.

The sect’s Eldorado ranch was built three years ago, possibly in response to stepped-up pressure on the group in Utah and Arizona.

Authorities said that once inside, they found several children born to mothers younger than 18, as well as a bed in the giant white temple that is the compound’s centerpiece. Investigators said they found a single long hair on the mattress that appeared to be a girl’s.

But on Friday, a witness for the sect testified that the bed’s purpose was simply to provide a place to rest. “There is no sexual activity in the temple,” William John Walsh, described as an expert in Mormon theology, testified.

During the first hearing Thursday, the court ground to a halt as hundreds of attorneys tried to make themselves heard. On Friday, things went somewhat more smoothly. Attorneys organized themselves into groups depending on the demographics of their clients and selected spokespeople to make objections and motions. One group represented boys younger than 4, another girls between 5 and 11.

But immense logistical problems remain as Texas tries to sort out what to do with the children. Lawyers came from across the state to represent the children but must now try to maintain contact from hundreds of miles away and sort through tangled family lineage.

Attorney Susan Hays traveled from Dallas to represent one girl whose mother says she is 30 years old. The state, however, classifies the mother as a juvenile and will not allow legal services to represent her. Hays said the mother is “as mad as a wet hen.”

“We need a troubleshooting desk,” she said.

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jenny.jarvie@latimes.com

deedee.correll@latimes.com

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Jarvie reported from San Angelo and Correll from Denver. Times staff writer Nicholas Riccardi in Colorado Springs contributed to this report.