Asked about that, Caver said, "No shots at all were fired."

Investigators said no one was found inside the temple.

The raid was prompted by phone calls from a16-year-old girl to a Texas child protective services hotline, alleging that she was being sexually and physically abused. She claimed to be married to a man named Dale Barlow, 49, and she had an 8-month-old baby and was already several weeks pregnant.

Authorities have taken 416 children into protective custody, but no one has yet been able to identify if the girl is among them.

"We may very well have her," Doran said Thursday. "We're dealing with a culture where they are taught early on they don't answer questions to a point."

Barlow, who lives in Arizona, told the Deseret Morning News Wednesday he hasn't been in Texas since 1977 and doesn't know the girl who made the allegations. The girl said Barlow last abused her on Easter Sunday. Barlow's parole officers and FLDS attorneys say they doubt he could have been at the ranch.

"I can't tell you if he was or was not on the (ranch) property at the time of the phone call or prior to that," Doran said, adding that he did speak by phone with someone whom he was told was Barlow.

But, the sheriff said, "He is still a suspect."

When asked if he knew there were underage girls marrying older men and bearing children, Doran said he knew the environment existed, but had no evidence.

As in any case, he said, if officers suspect a crime, they have to wait to obtain specific information to make an arrest. "You need good information, probably cause, evidence or an outcry," Doran said.

"We were aware this group is capable of (underage marriages and sex abuse), but this is the United States. We were going to respect them. We weren't going to violate their civil rights until we get an outcry or complaint ... or evidence that there's a problem."

When he and other government workers visited the 1,700-acre ranch in the past, the sheriff said he hadn't personally seen obviously young pregnant girls there. "They're very careful about who is seen in the community," he said.

Caver estimated there are about 65 to 75 men and a few women currently at the YFZ Ranch.

The sheriff would say little about a confidential informant who has provided him "great information" about the FLDS people over the past four years. He wouldn't say whether that person with ties to the community lives in Texas, Arizona or Utah.

As officers rounded up children to take them into protective custody, Caver said the residents appeared to be living their lives as usual. "They would sing and carry out normal daily activities, cooking, cleaning, that sort of thing."

Rangers weren't specifically aware whether any evidence was destroyed before the raid.

"We found shredded documents and that sort of thing. It's not certain at what time they'd been shredded," Caver said,

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E-mail: bwest@desnews.com