Lost to the Only Life They Knew

"He told me we had two different goals," Gideon said. "He wanted to get back into the community and said he couldn't help me."

Dan Barlow could not be reached for comment.

Gideon was staying with friends in St. George when the Glausers heard of his plight from a woman sympathetic to the Lost Boys.

"When Gideon came, he didn't know how to act around people," Stacha Glauser said. "This was like a foreign country for him."

Like many kids from his hometown, Gideon's poor education left his vocabulary wanting. When he was hungry, for instance, he asked Glauser to "build" him something to eat.

"I met his mother once; she was just a baby when she had him," Glauser said. "I told her she had a really wonderful son. She said she did the best she could, and that was it."

Last summer, five of the boys who left Colorado City and Hildale filed their lawsuit, claiming they were excommunicated unfairly. Gideon is not part of the suit.

Joanne Suder, a Baltimore lawyer and lead counsel in the case, said the expulsions had resulted in emotional and psychological damage to her clients.

"They are clearly trying to get rid of the competition. Warren Jeffs himself is reputed to have 70 wives," Suder said. "These kids are kicked out and lose the only world they ever knew. They leave without an education and can have no further contact with their family. It's horrible."

Despite the open practice of polygamy in these towns, authorities have been careful how they pursue offenders.

In 1953, Arizona state police swarmed into Short Creek, now Colorado City. They arrested the men and transported crying women and children to detention camps. The result was a public outpouring of sympathy for the families -- and scorn for state political leaders. The governor, Howard Pyle, lost the next election.

Today, law enforcement officials are going after the FLDS by targeting child sexual abuse, welfare fraud and tax evasion rather than polygamy. The Arizona attorney general's office has opened a branch in Colorado City, where an investigator looks into alleged illegalities.

In 2003, Rodney Holm, a Colorado City police officer, was sentenced to a year in prison and three years' probation on charges of bigamy and unlawful sex with two girls, 16 and 17. Another FLDS member, Orson William Black Jr., was charged with child sex crimes and is still at large.