Barlow warrant dropped in FLDS raid
"The warrant is no longer active," said Tom Vinger with the Texas Department of Public Safety Friday.
The warrant, for 50-year-old Dale Barlow of Colorado City, Ariz., accused him of being married to a 16-year-old "Sarah," whose phone call triggered the raid that resulted in more than 450 children being taken from the YFZ Ranch and placed in foster care.
Authorities said a phone call from someone claiming to be a girl named "Sarah," who was pregnant and in an abusive marriage, led to the raid.
"I do not know this girl that they keep asking about," Barlow told the Deseret News last month. "And I have not been to Texas since I was a young man back in 1977."
Texas Rangers traveled to St. George to question him but did not arrest him.
"There's been no interest by Texas in pursuing Dale," said Barlow's attorney, Bruce Griffen, Friday. "The question is whether there was a guy or whether the whole thing was a hoax to begin with."
Vinger said investigators are continuing to scrutinize the phone call and have named a Colorado woman as a "person of interest." Rozita Swinton, 33, is facing charges accusing her of making a phony abuse call to Colorado Springs police. Texas Rangers were there when she was arrested last month, and they seized evidence from her apartment that they acknowledged was related to calls regarding the FLDS compounds in Eldorado, Texas, and Colorado City, Ariz.
Authorities have said they are investigating if Swinton made similar hoax calls purporting to be "Sarah" or "Laurie" to Utah and Arizona child welfare workers.
Attorneys have said that even if the original call that prompted the raid is a hoax, it doesn't affect the child custody case. It is what child protective services workers found when they responded to the ranch that is at issue. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services said its workers found evidence of abuse involving teenage mothers at the YFZ Ranch.
Still, an attorney for the FLDS Church said there wasn't legitimate probable cause.
"That's one more piece of evidence in the puzzle that demonstrates Texas never had legitimate probable cause to go into the ranch in the first place, and failed to do any sort of normal corroboration of these claims before they went in there," said Rod Parker, spokesman for the FLDS Church.
Parker said if the call is found to be a hoax, it could affect the criminal case and may have some bearing on civil lawsuits being considered by the FLDS Church.
Recent comments
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