GenQ

Officials in Texas have removed 183 girls and women from a breakaway Mormon sect ranch linked to jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, following investigations into a potential child abuse case.

Texas Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner confirmed the 137 girls and 46 women ratio, but could not discuss why they were taken from the ranch or whether their leaving was voluntarily. She said of the girls removed, the ages ranged from six months to 17 years old.

She also revealed that only 18 members of the group had been placed in the legal custody of the state agency.
Local news reports said temporary shelters had been set up in churches and government buildings to house them.

Ms Meisner could not say what would happen next to the women and children taken from the ranch. She described the situation as "changing hour by hour."

She said ranch residents were cooperating with authorities.

As previously mentioned, that raid on the ranch was in response to allegations a 50-year-old man there had married and fathered a child with an underage girl.

Acting on a warrant for the arrest of an adult suspect, police seized all records detailing the marriage, as well as computer equipment and recording devices, photographs, videos or DVDs, as reported by the Standard-Times.

"The caseworkers need to have an opportunity to assess their needs and try to find out what the appropriate action will be," CPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins said.

The ranch is a compound for the renegade Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamist group led by Jeffs until last year.

In November, Jeffs was sentenced in a Utah court to 10 years to life in prison as an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old first cousin.

He is in jail in Arizona awaiting trial on similar charges for arranged marriages there.

During Jeffs' trial in St George, Utah, last year a woman tearfully told the court how she had been forced into marriage aged 14 at a ceremony he had conducted at a motel in Nevada in 2001.

The woman, identified only as "Jane Doe IV", said Jeffs performed the wedding despite her protests at the choice of husband.

Prosecutors said Jeffs instructed the girl to "multiply and replenish the earth and raise children in the priesthood".

Defence lawyers said Jeffs did no more than offer routine advice in his capacity as a religious leader.

The mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon faith is officially known, renounced polygamy more than a century ago and tries to distance itself from breakaway factions that still practice it.

Tags: abuse, religion