Was polygamist raid doomed from start?

SAN ANGELO, Texas — For nearly two months, Texas child-welfare officials had insisted conditions at a polygamist group's ranch were so abusive that none of its members should be allowed to keep their children.

Now, some are looking for what went wrong when the state raided the Yearning For Zion Ranch and removed more than 400 children.

Since the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Texas Department of Child Protective Services (CPS) overreached when it swept the children into foster care and ordered that the children be returned to their families, agency officials have been unwilling to discuss the case.

However, some close to the case said the operation was doomed from the start by a series of missteps.

First is the oddity of a religious sect the agency knew little about, exacerbating the perils of balancing parental rights and child safety.

Then there were the abuse allegations, starting with mysterious telephone calls — which appear to have been a hoax — and echoed by disgruntled former members, seemingly accepted at face value.

An ill-fated 1992 brush with another religious sect — which led to the fiery deaths of 21 children at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco — lingers on the agency's collective conscience, too.

Folks in Schleicher County had been at least curious, if not suspicious, of members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a breakaway from the Mormon church whose members think polygamy earns glorification in heaven.

Members of the 10,000-member sect revere leader Warren Jeffs as a prophet. Since the Texas group built its Yearning For Zion ranch just outside Eldorado four years ago, he has been convicted in Utah as an accomplice to rape and is in jail in Arizona awaiting trial on separate charges.

Sheriff David Doran cultivated a confidential informant to monitor the group's activities, and former FLDS members recounted abuse and forced marriages to anyone who would listen.

Investigators "listened to a lot of misinformation and allowed themselves to be kind of captivated by these anti-FLDS people," FLDS spokesman Rod Parker said.

When someone purporting to be a pregnant 16-year-old called a domestic-abuse hotline claiming her middle-age husband beat her, authorities went in with CPS workers April 3. But the calls may have been a hoax.

"We had no choice but to treat those calls as credible. If we had not treated them as credible and something bad happened, people would be very upset," said Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, which is investigating possible sex abuse at the ranch in addition to the origin of the hotline calls.

Children and mothers were taken away from the ranch because CPS workers thought it would be better to interview them at a neutral location, something that wasn't done with the Branch Davidians.

Although caseworkers said when they took custody of the children that the sect was forcing underage girls into marriage and sex and training boys to be adult perpetrators, only a few dozen of the children turned out to be teenage girls, and only a handful had children or were pregnant. Of 31 mothers CPS said were minors, at least half turned out to be adults.

David Schenck, an attorney for some of the mothers, said CPS workers were confronted with a decision at the ranch: identify all the men who might be suspected abusers or grab all the children.

"They were interested in taking care of kids, but the problem is they took on more than the evidence is going to support," he said.

State officials said they would seek to remove FLDS children from their parents' custody on an individual basis and pursue possible cases of abuse. "The child-custody issues and other court proceedings do not impact the ongoing criminal investigation," said Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for the Texas Attorney General's Office.

Material from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.