US: Police in polygamy raid defend delay in taking action

Police in Texas today defended their handling of a raid on the giant headquarters of a polygamist sect.

Hundreds of children, mostly girls, were taken into state protection last week amid allegations of under-age sex and multi-marriages in the 1,700-acre compound which was established four years ago.

Sheriff David Doran said they were suspicious about activities there.

But the sect scattered whenever officials visited, leaving them without the concrete evidence they needed to open a criminal investigation.

“I have no regrets because we never received any outcry, a complaint. There was no evidence of illegal activity nor an offence in plain view,” he said.

“You can always suspect something, but until you get something that puts you on that property, there’s not a whole lot you can do.”

The raid was finally triggered after a helpline received a hushed phone call from a terrified 16-year-old girl saying her 50-year-old husband had beaten and raped her.

State troopers put into action a prepared plan to enter the compound, and 416 children were removed on suspicion that they were being sexually and physically abused.

Sheriff Doran said it was not until after the raid began that he learned that the sect was marrying under-age girls at the compound and had a bed in its soaring limestone temple where the girls were required to immediately consummate their marriages. Several teenage girls are pregnant.

It had been no secret that the sect believed in marrying under-age girls to older men, and authorities believed the group was capable of abuse, he said.

“But there again, this is the US. We are going to respect them. We’re not going to violate their civil rights until we get an outcry.”

Authorities in Texas feared trouble ever since members of the renegade Mormon splinter group, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, bought a ranch and began building.

Warren Jeffs, the sect’s prophet and spiritual leader at its former headquarters in the dusty, adjacent towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, was charged in 2005 and 2006 with forcing under-age girls into marriages. He was convicted in September in Utah of being an accomplice to rape and is serving life in prison.

Sheriff Doran had made occasional visits to the compound – he even called to tell members of Jeffs’ capture in 2006 – but he said he saw nothing to warrant a criminal investigation.

“You can only press someone so far without having a criminal investigation going on,” he said, adding that members are not forthcoming when talking to outsiders.

Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott said state authorities handled the case properly.

“You cannot go in and bust in someone’s house if there’s not probable cause to do so,” he said.

Police still have not been able to identify the teenage girl who made the call that prompted the raid..

The man alleged to be the 16-year-old’s husband, Dale Barlow, is a registered sex offender who pleaded no contest to having sex with a minor in Arizona.