Families’ Hope Turns to Despair as Day Wears On : Reaction: Southland residents with relatives among cult’s members are left numb with grief. Some find solace in spiritual beliefs.

All morning long, as she watched the smoldering remains of the Branch Davidian compound on a television set in her Anaheim Hills home, Ruth Mosher remained confident that her daughter had been rescued from what appeared to be a mass suicide in Waco, Tex.

She pinned her hopes, she said, on unconfirmed reports that up to 30 members of the cult had left the compound Monday morning, before the blaze broke out. Sherri Lynn Jewell, 43, Mosher’s only child, “taught the (cult’s) children, so maybe she got out with them,” said Mosher, 69.

But by early afternoon, when a list of survivors was released by FBI officials and Jewell was not on it, Mosher broke down.

“I don’t think there’s any more hope,” she said. “I mean, the fire’s gone down and there’s nothing left. I can’t talk.”

Like several other Southland residents who had relatives living in the compound during the 51-day standoff with cult leader David Koresh, Mosher would speak of her daughter’s life--but not her death. Mosher’s reason was grief; Karen Doyle’s reason was God.

To Doyle--a 21-year-old cult member from La Verne whose father, Clive, 51, escaped but whose sister, Shari, 18, did not--what matters is her sister’s spirit. And she believes that lives on.

“God will take care of them spiritually,” Doyle said. “Whatever God has prophesied in the past is happening.”

Robyn Bunds would speak but very little. Koresh was the father of Bunds’ 4-year-old son. Bunds left the cult more than two years ago and has been living in Pomona with her mother, Janine.

“They were very upset, shocked, numb,” said La Verne Police Sgt. John P. Hackworth, who has been investigating the Branch Davidians since November, 1992, and was with Bunds and her mother when the compound went up in flames on television. “They’ll make it. They’re strong people.”

“They felt that they were going to see God now,” Robyn Bunds told CBS News. “This was the end.”

Mosher’s day began about 5:30 a.m., when her 12-year-old granddaughter, Kiri, telephoned from Michigan to say FBI agents had stormed the compound and were shooting tear gas into the buildings where the group was holded up.

Kiri “was glad,” Mosher recalled. “She said, ‘Now my mom can come out and we can end all of this.’ She thought her mother could come back to us.”

Jewell, who was divorced, and Kiri had lived with Mosher from 1987 until last summer, when Kiri opted to move in with her father in Michigan, the family said.

David Jewell had filed a court complaint that Kiri’s welfare was in jeopardy because his former wife was a cult member. Sherri Jewell first associated with the Branch Davidians while living in Hawaii, where she had been born, Mosher said.

“Kiri choosing her father broke Sherri’s heart,” Lyle Mosher said of his stepdaughter. “That sort of made her ready for Waco.”

Mosher spoke with her daughter weekly after Jewell moved to Waco in 1992. But all communications were cut off when the siege began. Mosher flew to Texas last month to try to communicate with her daughter but, like other relatives of the Branch Davidians, she was not allowed into the compound.

Nothing Jewell ever told Mosher about being with the Branch Davidians prepared her for what she called “the invasion” by government agents 51 days ago, or the blaze that tragically ended the standoff Monday morning.

“They’re peace-loving and they don’t ever hurt anybody,” Mosher said. “Sherri once told me, ‘Don’t worry about me. It (life at the compound) won’t go on forever . . . you shouldn’t worry about it.’ Of course I was scared, but I didn’t know what to expect. And no one I asked could tell me.”

But Karen Doyle was never afraid, and on Monday, spoke lovingly of Koresh and the Branch Davidian culture. “In all his teachings I never heard David call himself Jesus; we’re all children of God,” she said.

But before learning of her sister’s death in the compound, Doyle had been equally certain of another Koresh teaching.

The authorities “think we’re going to commit a mass suicide, and we have never been taught to do that,” Doyle said. “I wouldn’t want to commit suicide. What’s the point of it?”

Times staff writers Maria L. La Ganga and Rene E. Tawa contributed to this story.