Sect children leave for foster care
SAN ANGELO, Texas – Kept together at large west Texas sites for two weeks, the first of more than 400 children taken from a polygamist compound boarded buses Tuesday bound for group homes and other faraway foster care facilities.
The children eagerly waved and smiled at television cameras as the buses rolled out. Adult members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, meanwhile, filed through an unmarked building on a courthouse square in nearby Eldorado for a second day of DNA testing.
Authorities are trying to map the tangled family trees that came to light during the investigation of a teenage girl’s allegation of abuse by her much older husband.
Lawyers inside San Angelo Coliseum who were meeting with their adult or child clients said state Children’s Protective Services workers installed tight security, allowing no one in or out while the children, 114 of them by day’s end, were loaded onto the buses.
The remaining 300 children at the coliseum were still undergoing DNA testing and could be moved on Thursday, said Guy Choate, a state bar official who has been coordinating the attorneys brought from all over the state to represent the children.
State District Judge Barbara Walther signed an order Tuesday allowing the state to begin moving the children into temporary foster care while the state completes DNA testing of the 437 children and at least 175 adults and develops individual custody and treatment plans.
On Monday, technicians tested children and parents in the coliseum. On Tuesday, the state added a testing site closer to the ranch, on the Eldorado courthouse square.
On Tuesday, former FLDS member David Williams arrived from Nevada to give a DNA sample.
Clutching a Book of Mormon and photos of his boys, ages 5, 7 and 9, Williams looked at his feet as he said his children were “taken hostage by the state.”
“I have been an honorable American and father and I have carefully sheltered my children from the sins of this generation,” Williams said. He denied the children living at the ranch were abused.