Texas agency defends actions at FLDS ranch

AUSTIN, Texas — A spokesman for a polygamist sect raided by authorities last year faced tough questioning Tuesday from Texas lawmakers as he blasted child welfare officials for insisting they did the right thing in the year-ago raid that put 439 children in foster care.

The House Human Services Committee held the hearing to ask the Department of Family and Protective Services, sect members, lawyers and others involved the raid last April — one of the largest custody cases in U.S. history — what lessons were learned. The committee is also considering a bill that would expand the statute of limitations on bigamy and toughen the penalties for failing to report child abuse.

"Did you tolerate the underage marriage of girls to adult men at the ranch?" committee chairman Rep. Patrick Rose asked in a pointed exchange with Willie Jessop, a spokesman for the Fundamentalist LDS Church.

Jessop paused, stammered and then said he doesn't live at the ranch and didn't know what happened there.

"It's inappropriate for me to speculate about what I don't know," said Jessop, who lawmakers put under oath as he stumbled on the underage marriage question.

"I don't believe that you don't know," responded Rose, D-Dripping Springs.

DFPS Commissioner Anne Heiligenstein, who took over the agency after the raid, said she believes the agency made the best decisions it could considering the circumstances, despite the Texas Supreme Court ruling ordering the children be returned to their parents.

"We will respond again if that's what we need to do," she said. "We did the right thing."

Heiligenstein pointed to the agency's investigation that found nearly 30 percent of the girls ages 12-17 were abused and that more than 200 children, mostly siblings, were exposed to underage marriages of girls.

Only one of the children taken from the Yearning For Zion Ranch remains in foster care. Heiligenstein said the agency is seeking permanent custody of that 14-year-old who was allegedly married to jailed FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs when she was 12.

Jessop criticized the agency's contention that it had done the right thing.

"We can't afford to have that happen again," he said, citing the mass removal of children and mothers.

In their questioning, lawmakers on the panel were clearly skeptical about Jessop's defense of the community and his insistence that underage marriages had not been sanctioned by the church in years. The FLDS, which believes polygamy brings glorification in heaven, is a breakaway sect of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which renounced polygamy more than a century ago.

FLDS Church member Zavenda Jessop had planned to testify but changed her mind.