E-mails detail secret plan to separate polygamist moms, kids

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, June 05, 2008
ELDORADO

State officials, citing fears of violence, tried but failed to persuade a judge to move hundreds of children and mothers from a West Texas polygamist sect together to a town near Dallas before separating them, according to e-mails from the governor's office after an April 3 raid on the ranch.

The secret plan — and the state's fear of a violent response to the raid of the ranch near Eldorado — was revealed in 1,500 pages of e-mails The Dallas Morning News obtained under public records laws.

The volley of e-mails between Child Protective Services and the governor's office included concerns about a possible chicken pox outbreak — 20 children fell sick in the first two weeks after the raid — and fears that the mothers might try to flee the shelter with their children, the newspaper reported Wednesday.

The governor's office learned of the planned raid two days beforehand.
Meanwhile, sect members had picked up all 440 children from Texas foster homes by Wednesday.

The Department of Public Safety and the attorney general's office have taken over the criminal investigation.

Child welfare officials have accused members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of pushing underage girls into marriages with older men, but the evidence needed to support a criminal case could prove elusive.
No more than five underage pregnant girls have been identified, and unless they were under 17 when they got pregnant and the father was older than 19, any sexual abuse crime would be difficult to prove.

According to the e-mails released this week, state officials initially planned to separate the women and children on April 11 at a Salvation Army facility in Midlothian, about 25 miles southwest of Dallas. The women and children were to be loaded on buses and then told that all non-nursing mothers would be separated.

But Judge Barbara Walther vetoed the transfer, and the families were separated without incident on April 14.

Preparations were secret to keep media from camping out at likely foster homes and to avoid alerting "angry men at the compound," said an e-mail from Kathy Walt, Perry's deputy chief of staff.

Additional material from staff writer Chuck Lindell.
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http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/06/05/0605flds....
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