June 19, 2005, Los Angeles Times, Polygamy's 'Lost Boys' expelled from only life they knew, by David Kelly,

 

''People have said to me: 'Why don't you prosecute the parents?' But the kids don't want their parents prosecuted; they want us to get the number one bad guy -- Warren Jeffs. He is chiefly responsible for kicking out these boys."

The 49-year-old Jeffs is the prophet, or leader, of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The FLDS, as it is known, controls Hildale and Colorado City.

The sect, which broke from the Mormon Church more than a century ago, has between 10,000 and 15,000 members.

It believes in ''plural marriage," that a man must have at least three wives to reach the highest levels of heaven. The Mormon Church forbids polygamy and excommunicates those who practice it.

Polygamy is also illegal, and in recent weeks law enforcement has turned up the heat on the FLDS.

On June 10, Jeffs was indicted in Arizona on charges that he had arranged a marriage between a 28-year-old man, who was already married, and a 16-year-old girl.

He faces two years in prison if convicted, though he has not been arrested and is thought to be in Texas.

A few days earlier, a Utah judge froze the assets of the United Effort Plan, an FLDS trust that owns most of the homes and land in the polygamous towns.

And on May 24, the records of the financially troubled Colorado City Unified School District were seized to prevent any evidence of potential wrongdoing from being spirited away, according to the Arizona attorney general's office.

At the same time, Jeffs is being sued by five of the Lost Boys, who contend he conspired to banish them so church elders would have less competition for wives.

Jeffs has not responded to the lawsuit, filed in Utah's Third District Court, leaving him open to a default judgment from the bench.

''There is a virtual Taliban down there. You tell people this stuff happens and they don't believe it," said Dan Fischer, a former FLDS member and dentist living outside Salt Lake City who helps educate and house the exiled teens. The exodus ''has been far more dramatic in the last year."

FLDS officials rarely speak to the media.

But church lawyer Rodney Parker, who is not a member of the faith, said some of the ousted boys were delinquents or proved unable to live up to the community's strict moral code.

''I think many are minimizing their own behavior," he said. ''These places are very different and very strange. But broad-stroke claims about what goes on down there are exaggerations -- and often fiction."

About half a dozen boys who spoke recently say it is all too real.

Tom Sam Steed said he was put on ''religious probation" at 15 for sneaking off to see the film ''Charlie's Angels."

He said he made a personal plea to Jeffs, meeting him in a Colorado City print shop.

''He told me I wasn't welcome," Steed said. ''And on the way out he said: 'Just to let you know, when the final devastation comes, you will be destroyed.' I believed it completely. If you are told your whole life the Earth is flat, what else would you believe?"

Once children are expelled, the FLDS forbids parents from visiting them, and violating the rule can result in eviction from their church-owned homes, say state authorities and former town residents. Many parents sever all ties to their sons.

In some cases, families outside the communities have unofficially adopted the boys.

That's what happened to Gideon. A Mormon couple, Stacha and Neil Glauser of St. George, took him in.