The Texas Dept of Family and Protective Services now says all the children from the polygamist compound have been moved to two locations in San Angelo, Texas. There are 419 in all. What happens next? I think that’s what TX DFPS is trying to figure out now. They’ve never had a case of this size.

If all of those children do stay in state custody, how do you place them? Even before this happened, Texas didn’t have nearly enough foster families. And how do you place a child who may have children of her own? And what about the adult mothers who left the compound with their children? A court hearing for the children will be held next week.

We’re also beginning to learn details about the initial complaint that led officials to the compound and what social workers and law enforcement found once they arrived. A 6-page affidavit was released yesterday during a Texas DFPS press conference. Here are a few excerpts – to read the whole affidavit, click here.

From page 3:

The teenaged mother stated that she began to be abused shortly after she started living at the YFZ Ranch. She advised that the adult male would “beat and hurt” her whenever he got angry. According to the caller, this would include the man hitting her in the chest and choking her and that while such abuse was occuring one of the other women in the home would hold her infant child. She reported that the last time he beat her was on Easter Sunday 2008. The report also indicated that, on a previous occasion, the man had beaten her so severely that it resulted in her having several broken ribs, for which she was taken to the hospital. She reported that the doctor wrapped her torso in an ace bandage and told her to “take it easy for a few days”. She also indicated that the man would hurt her, explaining that he would force himself on her sexually. She also indicated that she is several weeks pregnant.

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We had a moment of levity while covering the polygamist raid.

done

All the media is camped out in a parking lot across from Ft. Concho where the children from the compound are staying. To get a sense of the layout, there’s the parking lot, train tracks, and an area where reporters were doing live shots. The photographers asked around and had been assured there wasn’t a train coming though for days.

There were at least a dozen sets of cables across the tracks. Murphy’s law being what it is, after a few hours of live shots, what do we hear? Sure enough, a train was coming. Photographers everywhere scrambled out onto the tracks to pull the cable out of the path of the train. Our photographer caught the tail end of it on tape.

Note to bosses: Our expensive cables were never in danger since we were across the street doing a live shot using wireless gear.

Where do you even start on a story like this? What’s going on in a small part of West Texas is disturbing and fascinating. It’s a small glimpse into a life most of us can hardly imagine.

It began with a phone call. Texas Child Protective Services said it received two phone calls last week from a 16-year-old girl, who claimed to live at a polygamist compound outside Eldorado, Texas. She said she’d been forced to marry a 50-year-old man when she was 15 and also bore him a child.

Police and CPS arrived at the compound and began investigating last Thursday night. Over the next few days, they pulled 400 children out and more than one hundred adult mothers followed. Bus after bus streamed into Eldorado, and then to San Angelo, which is 45 minutes north.

At the daily press briefings each afternoon, CPS kept adding more children to the list. Where were they coming from? Had they been hidden? These are question CPS says it can’t answer for us — yet. Keep Reading …