SAN ANGELO, Texas—Law enforcement officers denied Friday they used fake calls to a domestic abuse hot line as a pretext to raid a polygamist sect’s ranch or that they prepared to rummage through the entire complex before a search warrant was issued.
Texas Ranger Brooks Long and Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran both testified in the third day of a hearing on whether evidence gathered in the raid should be excluded from the trials of 10 men from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The men face charges including sexual assault of a child and bigamy stemming from the raid last April.
The hearing ended late Friday and was to resume Saturday.
Attorneys for the defendants, all of the sect men charged except jailed leader Warren Jeffs and a member only facing a misdemeanor charge, have accused law enforcement of failing to check the veracity of the hot line calls because the state wanted an excuse to rummage through the ranch.
But Long testified Friday that the caller, now believed to be a Colorado woman with a history of mental illness and false calls to law enforcement, was believable at the time and hot line workers were convinced she was a 16-year-old mother who was being abused at the ranch.
“They totally believed this was going on and that this girl was in danger,” Long said.
He and Doran also denied allegations by the FLDS lawyers that they had planned for a giant raid even though the initial search warrant only gave them authority to look for the girl, her baby and her husband.
The hearing continued into the evening Friday, and it was unclear how long it would take to complete. Texas District Judge Barbara Walther asked pointed questions earlier in the hearing but on Friday allowed attorneys to question Long for nine hours before Doran was put on the stand in the evening.
Defense attorneys want the evidence from the raid, which included some 928 boxes of family photos, computers and church documents, excluded from the trials. Some appear to show underage marriages and more than one woman married to the same man.
Law enforcement raided the ranch in April 2008 after someone claiming to be a 16-year-old mother and wife said she was being physically abused at the ranch. Later, it turned out that “Sarah Barlow,” as the caller was identified, didn’t exist. The name of the alleged husband on the search warrants was offered by a domestic abuse hot line worker who did an Internet search for “Barlow” and found stories about a previous case involving a sect member in Arizona.
The Texas Rangers have since named a 34-year-old Colorado Springs, Colo., woman as a “person of interest” in the hot line calls. The Colorado Springs woman, Rozita Swinton, has a history of multiple personality disorder and faked reports of abuse to law enforcement—something Long said that authorities didn’t learn until days after the raid was completed.
Swinton faces a misdemeanor charge of making a false report in a separate incident in Colorado but has not been charged in Texas.
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.
Jeffs, jailed in Arizona on charges of being an accomplice to rape and previously convicted in Utah, also faces charges in Texas of sexual assault of a child and bigamy.
