(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-04-11 13:47

SAN ANGELO, Texas - It was no secret that a polygamist sect that built a compound in the West Texas desert believed in marrying off underage girls to older men. And the sheriff had an informant for four years who was feeding him information about life inside the sect.

Law enforcement officials escort members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints onto a school bus in Eldorado, Texas, Sunday, April 6, 2008. Authorities took 220 women and children from the compound. The group was relocated to San Angelo, Texas. [Agencies]

But authorities say their hands were tied until last week, when they finally obtained the legal grounds to move against the group.

The trigger for the raid was a hushed phone call from a terrified 16-year-old girl to a family-violence shelter to report that her 50-year-old husband had beaten and raped her. State troopers put into action the plan they had on the shelf to enter the 1,700-acre compound, and 416 children, most of them girls, were swept into state custody because of suspicions that they were being sexually and physically abused.

Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran, right, addresses a question during a news conference as Department of Public Safety spokesperson Tela Mange, left, looks on in San Angelo, Texas, Thursday, April 10, 2008. When authorities moved to search the large white temple on the polygamist compound iof the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints compound in Eldorado, Texas, five dozen of the sect's men were arrayed around a tall concrete wall surrounding the structure, the investigators said. [Agencies]

On Thursday, state and local law enforcement authorities defended their decision to leave the sect alone for four years after it moved in.

 

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"We are aware that this group is capable of "sexually abusing girls, Sheriff David Doran said. "But there again, this is the United States. We are going to respect them. We're not going to violate their civil rights until we get an outcry."

Doran said it was not until after the raid began that he learned that the sect was, in fact, marrying off underage girls at the compound and had a bed in its soaring limestone temple where the girls were required to immediately consummate their marriages. Also, investigators say a number of teenage girls there are pregnant.

Authorities in Texas suspected there would be trouble ever since members of the renegade Mormon splinter group -- the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- bought an exotic game ranch in Eldorado in 2004 and began building the ranch.

Warren Jeffs, the sect's prophet and spiritual leader at its longtime headquarters in the dusty, side-by-side towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., was charged in 2005 and 2006 with forcing underage girls into marriages there. He was convicted in September in Utah of being an accomplice to rape and is serving up to life in prison.

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