Men cry as temple searched

ELDORADO, Texas (AP) — When authorities moved to search the large white temple on the polygamist compound in West Texas, about five dozen of the sect’s men prayed and cried around the structure, state investigators said yesterday.

Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran also said he had been working with a confidential informant for four years who was telling him about life inside the polygamist sect.

Sheriff Doran said it wasn’t until after the search had begun that he learned about marriage beds in the temple and the forced marriages of underage girls to older men.

“It was instrumental in teaching me the group’s ways,” Sheriff Doran said.

Still, state authorities defended their decision to leave the sect alone for the four years it encamped in West Texas.

“We are aware that this group is capable of [sexually abusing young girls],” Sheriff 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. I’ve said that from Day One.”

Texas Ranger Capt. Barry Caver said some of the 57 men near the wall were on their knees praying. Others sobbed. One resisted officers’ attempt to enter the area and was arrested.

When authorities gained entrance to the three-story building, no one was inside. On the top floor of the temple, they found beds that authorities suspect men used after they married underage girls.

Capt. Caver said authorities made the temple the last stop on the weeklong search because “if there was going to be any resistance at all it would be then.”

He described the difficulties faced by child welfare officials in finding and removing all 416 children from the compound.

The children “were shuffled around houses as we were searching,” he said, noting that as soon as children were seen in one house, they would be ushered to other houses.

Officials left the compound and still had not identified the 16-year-old girl who called to report that she had been beaten and raped by her husband.

“When you’re dealing with a culture like this, they’re taught from very [early] on that they don’t answer questions to the point,” Sheriff Doran said. “And we may very well have her at Child Protective Services. All of that is certainly being sorted out right now.”

The discovery of the marriage beds in the temple was revealed Wednesday as troopers completed their search of the grounds of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Court documents said several teen girls at the compound were pregnant, and all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of “emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse.” Another 139 women left on their own.

Texas has an outstanding arrest warrant for the man thought to have been the girl’s husband, Dale Barlow, 50. He is a registered sex offender who pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor in Mohave County, Ariz., last year.