The Dallas Morning News
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 01.04.2009

If it were up to Joseph and Lori Jessop, they'd be back at their West Texas polygamist ranch, not living in a vast San Antonio home with a hot tub and leather sofas.

Their three blond children clamoring around them — springing off trampolines, drag-racing strollers, needing noses wiped and coats zipped up over matching outfits — mask the despair the Jessops say they feel over their detachment.

"The loneliness, you can't imagine it," Lori says softly. "This is not the life we chose."

Back on the land the young couple left after about 440 children were removed from their parents, in a state raid that the courts ultimately struck down, another sect family is still healing. Edson Jessop and wife Zavenda Young say their four youngsters won't sleep alone, and think every motor home on the horizon is a bus coming to take them away.

"We are very much a disrupted community," Edson says.

Nearly nine months since Texas authorities raided the Yearning for Zion polygamist ranch and took hundreds of children into temporary custody, the families upended by the largest-ever U.S. child-welfare case cling to their culture.

Some members of the Utah-based Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints hunker down in suburban subdivisions across Texas, struggling to maintain piety and an austere lifestyle in the face of influences they consider immoral. Others have moved back to the ranch, trying to restore sanctity and self-sufficiency to their once-thriving community.

Members of the breakaway Mormon sect say the state jumped to conclusions based on religious bigotry, sweeping into their sacred temple and snatching healthy, happy children based on a hoax call and bad information from their critics. Child Protective Services says it was required by law to check out the initial tip — purportedly a distraught sect teenager's plea for help to a women's shelter, though now suspected of being from a Colorado woman with a history of filing false police reports.

CPS officials say once they began to interview girls at the ranch, caseworkers grew alarmed over possibly widespread child sexual abuse, involving girls pressured into "spiritual" marriages with older men. Agency leaders defend the mass removal as necessary so caseworkers could investigate their suspicions. State courts ultimately ruled, though, that CPS removed too many children without enough proof each was at risk of abuse, especially those who hadn't reached puberty.

CPS recently capped its nine-month investigation with a report saying a dozen girls younger than 16 were "spiritually united" to adult men in the past four years. Of the 12, seven gave birth, CPS said. And nearly two-thirds of sect families investigated had children who were abused or neglected, mostly through inappropriate exposure to underage marriages.

Separately, a dozen men from the sect — including prophet Warren Jeffs — have been indicted on charges such as sexual assault of a child and felony bigamy. None has gone to trial.

Sect parents, though deeply affected, hardly call the shots in what has become a protracted legal and public-relations battle between their church and Texas. Some say living at the ranch is still too risky. Others, confident that CPS can't convince the public that the sect's youth should be foster children, have urged all sect members to return.

Four recently agreed to talk.

Joseph and Lori Jessop admit they were among the luckiest parents at the ranch.

The gentle, well-spoken couple (he's 27, she's 26) say they have had a monogamous marriage so far, putting them on safer legal footing than many of their friends. While other mothers were separated from their children, attorneys succeeded in keeping Lori with her infant.

Many families remained under court-ordered monitoring for months, but the Jessops say they were the first family to be "non-suited," or dropped from court oversight, after they moved to San Antonio. Now, their 5-year-old daughter, Ziana, throws around the legal term with glee.

Still, the Jessops complain of unwanted outside influences on their children.

The tots have asked questions about scantily clad women, cigarette smoke, rock music and road rage. They have picked up the command "Mine." And they've described — in detail — the images they were shown in custody to determine if they'd been victims of sexual abuse.

"It's all about exposure," Lori says, a flash of anger breaking across her face. "You walk into a store, and it's all right in front of them."

The children are battling far more than outside influence. Joeson, the Jessops' 3-year-old, is again sucking the pacifier he gave up before the raid. All of the children now insist on sleeping in their parents' bedroom, Joseph says, and "come unglued" when they see buses — the vehicles that first carried them away from the ranch.

They crouch in the front window of their house, whispering that passing neighbors "look like cops." Instead of playing house, Ziana makes believe that she is "going to see my attorney."

The Jessops have maintained parts of their past life. Ziana is home-schooled and can name all the church's prophets. The children are unfailingly polite and perfectly groomed: the boys in tiny jeans and collared shirts, Ziana in braids and conservative floor-length prairie dresses. The youngsters don't watch TV — they have books and building blocks.

But most of what they loved about life on the ranch is impossible to replicate.

http://www.azstarnet.com/news/274413

Emphasis added by H4K Editor