With one objection following another following another, the biggest child custody case in Texas history is unfolding at a glacial pace as a judge decides the fate of 416 children removed from a polygamist sect’s ranch.
The hearing, which was briefly recessed Thursday morning, reconvened with numerous attorneys for the children and for their parents repeatedly contending that their clients have been denied their due process rights.
The state wants to the children to remain in its custody, while parents want the children to be returned to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ compound.
After numerous objections, state District Judge Barbara Walther allowed the medical records of three girls to be admitted into evidence and turned to a discussion of whether family and school records found in a safe should be allowed.
Objections range from contentions that members of the breakaway Mormon sect are being discriminated against because of their religious beliefs to an assertion that the records might be spiritual do ents.
One do ent is en led the "Bishop’s record," and an attorney for one of the children taken from the compound said it should be reviewed by a special master to be appointed by the court before being introduced as evidence by the state.
"The church is not in front of the court today. The parents and children are before the court today," Walther said. "What I’m trying to get to is if these children should be returned to their parents."
At least one attorney said outside the courtroom that one solution might be for the men to be ordered to leave the ranch, with the women and children returning there under the supervision of state Child Protective Services officials.
During the court proceeding, names were read aloud from a do ent called the father’s family information sheet.
At least eight of the 10 men whose names were read had 16- or 17-year-old wives at the time their names were recorded on the sheet in March 2007, according to the do ent. The men ranged in age from their late 20s to their mid-50s. Some had children.
A sign of the effort to impose order on the unwieldy court process is the fact that the children taken from the Yearning for Zion ranch have been divided for purposes of the hearing by age, sex and whether teen-age girls are pregnant.
Each bloc of children has been assigned a color, and the judge is hearing objections by bloc.
The attorneys representing various categories of children wear their assigned color on their required court badges. Purple, for example, is assigned to lawyers representing girls between ages 5 and 11. Orange is assigned to lawyers representing underage girls who are pregnant.
Attorneys announce their color before speaking in court.
"There is nothing normal about this case," Walther said.
She said she was obliged under state law to grant the children a hearing within 14 days of their removal, and the number of cases made it impossible to schedule individual hearings.
The immense crowd has required the hearing to be carried in a live video feed to a city hall auditorium near the courtroom. Walther this morning called a recess to allow lawyers for the children to examine do ents filed by the state, and papers had to be carried from her courtroom to attorneys in the auditorium.
The case involving the sect has raised questions about the type of proof needed to take children from their homes.
Hundreds of attorneys began arriving at 8 a.m. at the courthouse and auditorium for the 10 a.m. hearing before Walther. Dozens of the children’s mothers in long, old-fashioned dresses were seen lining up to get into the courthouse.
State social workers and their lawyers hope to convince a state judge that all the children were either sexually or physically abused or at risk of being abused. CPS officials want the children to be placed in foster care.
The parents deny any abuse, saying they want their children returned to their families and a place where they are safe from the dangers of the outside world.
The case began when CPS investigators and law enforcement officers raided the Yearning for Zion ranch – where FLDS members have lived a heretofore reclusive life -- on April 3.
The raid occurred after officials said a girl named Sarah called a San Angelo women's shelter on March 29 and 30. The girl told a hotline counselor that she had been forced to be a wife and mother at the age of 15 and that she had been raped and beaten by her 50-year-old husband, according to the state.
CPS investigator Angie Voss took the stand this afternoon and told the court how she and 11 other investigators went to the YFZ Ranch that first night. She said men from the ranch met them at the gate and asked them what they wanted.
Voss said she informed them they were looking for a girl named Sarah.
"The men shook their heads and said no Sarahs lived there," Voss said.
But they allowed Voss and her team in, and the investigators asked to see all girls 17 and under. They were quickly informed there were several Sarahs living at the ranch.
Voss said that although no one was rude to the investigators, she became unnerved as she and three other investigators began interviewing girls in the schoolhouse. FLDS men were both in and outside the school
"I was afraid," Voss said. "I saw men all over. It felt like that schoolhouse was surrounded."
Several girls under the age of 18 were found to be pregnant.
CPS ended up removing 416 children, keeping them first at the Fort Concho historical park and now at the San Angelo Coliseum as part of their investigation into the children's lives at the 1700-acre ranch. The state decided Monday to separate many of the mothers from the children while they questioned them.
The FLDS mothers say they don't understand how the state can take away their children on the basis of what they see as an anonymous phone call that is likely a hoax. The FLDS members insist there was no such girl as the caller living among them, and that no one has ever been sexually abused at the ranch.
The mothers say the Yearning for Zion ranch is a world without drug abuse or domestic violence or firearms, one where children are free to roam.
"The children grow up with the freedom that it's OK to walk down the street," said a woman named Kathleen, who has five children in CPS custody and wouldn’t give her last name, "that you know you're going to be able to go somewhere and come back to your parents."
It's also a world where underage girls are sometimes married to adult men.
There's no minimum age at which girls are married, the women at the YFZ ranch say. The women, who talked to the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, said there are no very young girls who do this, but they wouldn’t say exactly how young the youngest is.
"We are law-abiding people," Kathleen said.
The mother of five children hasn’t seen some of them in 10 days, since shortly after CPS workers and law enforcement raided the ranch looking for evidence children were sexually or physically abused. She says their polygamous way of life provides the same kind of support any family provides.
"If you did have some children, don't your children enjoy the society of a grandmother? Don't your children enjoy the society of your sister's place, to make cookies, to do activities?" she said.
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I discovered all of this recently when I decided to pull my second grader out of school because he was assaulted by five older kids in the bathroom and the teacher didn't even bother to report the incident. I'll homeschool him for the rest of this year and next year he'll be attending a small private school.
