HOUSTON — Child welfare investigators who entered a polygamist compound in West Texas this weekend found many pregnant teenagers and underage girls who said they were forced to marry, according to court documents unsealed Tuesday.
The documents detailed the evidence that Texas officials presented to a judge to justify taking temporary state custody of more than 400 children from the YFZ Ranch, near the tiny town of Eldorado, built by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
The papers say that in responding to an initial report that a 16-year-old girl had been sexually abused at the ranch, a guarded complex with a towering limestone temple at its center, investigators found many young girls who either were pregnant or had given birth.
Lynn McFadden, an investigator with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, declared in an affidavit that it was "widespread pattern and practice" among young girls at the YFZ Ranch to enter into "spiritual marriages" arranged by the polygamist sect and to begin having sex with older men and giving birth as soon as they turned 13 or 14.
The men, she added, were "having sexual relationships with a number of women, some of whom are minors."
"A number of the children interviewed were unable or unwilling to provide the names of their biological parents or identified multiple mothers and were unable or unwilling to provide information such as their own birth dates," McFadden said in the affidavit, adding that adults also could not state the full names of many children.
Two surnames -- Jeffs and Jessop -- came up repeatedly in the court documents.
The FLDS, as the religious sect is known, broke away from the Mormon Church in the 1930s. Its self-styled prophet, Warren Jeffs, was convicted in Utah last year of being an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old to marry and have sex with her 19-year-old cousin. Jeffs, 52, is awaiting trial on similar charges in Arizona.
Angry over Texas' decision to take temporary custody of so many children -- the total had reached 416, or all of the youngsters in the compound, by Tuesday -- church elders and their attorneys fired back at the state, claiming religious persecution.
"There needs to be a public outcry that goes far and wide," Merrill Jessop, who oversees the YFZ compound -- which stands for Yearning for Zion -- told the Salt Lake Tribune. "What's coming we don't know. The hauling off of women and children matches anything in Russia or Germany."
