Getting your player ready...
SAN ANGELO, Texas — Authorities leveraged a fake abuse claim to justify a massive raid of a polygamist sect’s ranch when their true purpose was to persecute an unpopular religious group, attorneys for 10 indicted members of the sect said Wednesday.
“You were misled,” attorney Gerald Goldstein told District Judge Barbara Walther at a hearing on the defendants’ motion to suppress evidence seized in the April 2008 raid. Walther issued the search warrant allowing the raid.
Goldstein said an investigator failed to check the veracity of the domestic abuse hotline calls prompting the raid. The Texas Rangers have since named a 34-year-old Colorado Springs woman as a “person of interest” in the hotline calls.
