What Really Happened at the Coliseum

2009-02-28 20:46:29

By Donald Richter

The separation of the mothers from their young children that occurred in the San Angelo Coliseum on April 24, 2008, was the most traumatic experience of the entire YFZ raid. Many of the mothers kept detailed daily journals, and it is from their own accounts of these events that most of the information for this article has been obtained.

Mothers began receiving news of the impending separation as early as April 20 but did not know when it actually would occur. Attorneys told the mothers that their children were going to be removed and that even siblings would be separated and scattered throughout the state. One mother described a meeting with her attorney on April 22, two days before the separation:

"About this time I was called to see my attorney, it being close to dinner time. I walked in and Annette and Andrea were both standing there waiting to give me the news. I had waited all day to hear it from them but already knew all about what they were coming to tell us. Annette just said, “I don’t even know how to tell you what I have come to say.” I told her I already knew. I then broke down. She hugged me for a good five minutes as I silently cried. I guess it was too much for Andrea because she went out. I told Annette I was sorry because I intended to be strong for the children. She said she didn’t see how we could be much stronger than we already had as we had been through so much. She said, “Had anyone else in all the world been treated the way you people have been, there would have been violence, anger, and who knows what! You people have been calm, and very forgiving, something I will yet have to learn.” I said, “This is the hardest thing I have ever done in all my life, harder than bringing these children into the world. It hurts deeper.”

Expecting the separation to occur on April 23, she made the following entry in her journal that day:

Today was a long, tense day, knowing that any minute our children would be snatched from our sides, loaded on a bus, and taken far away. I spent much of the day talking to the children, telling them what I expected of them when I wasn’t with them…. I told them that we needed to be sweet when we were separated and to not scream. I told them it was okay to cry but to be calm and know that Heavenly Father would be watching.

After the day passed without the expected separation, the families knew that the event was almost a certainty the following day. When CPS started gathering people together on the morning of April 24, even such routine activities as eating and using the restroom became an added source of stress. After feeding her children a quick breakfast, one mother tried taking them to the restroom about 8:50 a.m. Five CPS workers standing by the restroom door refused entrance even though she pled that they would only take a minute and that the children were desperate. She was told that she would have to go back to her section. As she left, her daughter was crying because she needed the restroom so desperately.

In their individual section of the Coliseum, the families heard the message read by Martha Whitaker: “Last Friday the judge ruled that CPS is your child’s temporary legal guardian. While you still have rights and responsibilities, CPS determines where your child lives…. For the best interest of your children, CPS has determined they need to be moved and the mothers may not be with them….” Only mothers with children under twelve months old would be permitted to remain. A CPS worker had been assigned to each child, over 300 in all. Now that the edict had been delivered, these workers stepped forward to effect the separation immediately. Mothers felt that the process was unnecessarily cruel because instead of the children being taken away and the mothers being able to see them off to their new locations, the mothers were taken away, leaving the terrified children behind.

The advance preparation and training mothers had given their children is reflected in the faith with which a three-and-a-half-year-old girl faced the ordeal:

I said to my daughter, “Look, they are taking the children from the mothers. She looked up at me and said, “Mother, remember Heavenly Father and the Prophet said if they take the children from the mothers it will not be long. We will be together again.” She had such a sweet, humble spirit I just had to hug her and say, “Thank you. That is very encouraging.” I was grateful yet humbled that such a small child should show me how to remember the promises we had been given.

As one mother tried to give her children their clothes, a man stopped her and insisted she leave immediately. As calmly as she could, she said, “I am getting my children’s clothes for them. They haven’t yet had a chance to get dressed or go to the bathroom.” The man replied, “There are workers here to take care of that. You must leave NOW, Ms. Barlow!” She handed each of the children their clothes as the man became increasingly impatient to hasten her departure.

The fear in the children’s eyes, even my youngest daughter’s, was horrible. The man was literally yelling at me as I tried to take care of the last minute details. I smiled at the children as I handed them their clothes and told them I loved them…. Many children were screaming by this time, and the noise level was tremendous…. I wanted to give my children one last hug, but the man got in my face and tried to grab my arm. I picked up my bag and dresses, and he started pushing me out. Many mothers were still in the arena, so I didn’t know what the great rush was all about. I looked over at my precious children and told them to be brave and that I loved them. I smiled and waved at them as I was being marched and pushed out. My heart felt as though it was being torn from its place…..

I saw children screaming as workers pried them from their mothers, children whose arms were wrapped tightly around their mother’s neck, refusing to let go, being pulled off. I saw older children crying as their mothers gave them one last hug and told them to be brave. I saw fear in the children’s eyes and pain and anguish in every mother’s eyes. The sound, oh the awful cries that I know ascended into the heavens! Crying and screaming filled the room, a sound so haunting, so full of hurt and pain, was more than my heart could take, and my own tears began to flow down upon my hot cheeks…. I am on the bus now, writing, that the freshness of this experience will be caught on paper.

After a four-year-old girl had been interrogated by CPS investigators on April 16, she had refused to tell her mother what she had been asked at the interview, only saying, “I don’t want them to take you away from me.” Now she was sobbing that they had told her that they wouldn’t take her mother away if she didn’t tell her what they had said to her. “I didn’t tell them,” she kept saying as her mother was marched away. As one four-year-old boy was pried from his mother by two large men, his shirt ripped open and his undergarments pulled apart, exposing his chest and stomach. With a look of terror in his eyes, he screamed, “Don’t take my mother!” A five-year-old girl was in the hospital at the time of the separation with a 104 degree fever. Even though her physician had personally requested the mother’s presence at the hospital, she was not permitted to be there and was forced to leave the Coliseum with the rest of the mothers. (MHMR Letter #1)

As the mothers exited the Coliseum and waited in line for workers to sort through a pile of picture ID cards, a line of Texas Rangers stood on one side of the hallway and a line of state police on the other. Some of the mothers began singing the words of a favorite hymn: “Dearest children, God is near you, watching o’er you day and night…” Nearly every one of the armed officers wept, the tears flowing freely down their faces.

The mothers were told, “You can get on a bus and go back to the ranch, or you can get on a bus going to a women’s shelter in San Angelo. But if you get on the bus back to the ranch, you will probably never see your children again.” Some of the mothers suspected that the reason CPS was so anxious to have them go to the women’s shelter is that it would be tantamount to an admission that they had been abused and help provide an apparent justification for the raid. Forty others boarded the bus to the shelter and almost immediately were told that the shelter in San Angelo was too small to accommodate them and that it would be necessary to take them to San Antonio. The mothers protested this change, some of them quite loudly; however, they were not permitted to switch buses once they had boarded.

One mother hung a sign out the window reading “SOS Mothers Separated -- Help!” and reporters caught pictures of this as the bus pulled out. After considerable arguing back and forth, CPS official Jamie Rios allowed the bus to stop at the San Angelo shelter, where mothers called their attorneys and made arrangements for a ride back to the ranch.

Photo from Inside the Coliseum before the separation:

The story of what took place in the Coliseum after the mothers were taken away was told by those few mothers who still remained because CPS claimed they were underage and by the MHMR workers who documented the events in their anonymous reports. Many children screamed for hours while others lay on their cots limp and white as a sheet. One young mother watched a worker take an eighteen-month-old boy out to the nurses’ station screaming and bring him back a half hour later sound asleep. She asked, “What did you do to him?” “Oh, we just gave him a little medicine to help him sleep and kinda forget about everything,” she was told. The boy was drugged at 10:30 a.m. and still was sleeping at 4:30 p.m. The mother tried to help the boy, who was limp and couldn’t stand, almost unable to look her in the eye.

She carried him around most of the rest of the day. Another mother who observed the same incident added that she saw many children “lying around as if they had been gassed or sedated.” The boy went into shock that night and had to be hospitalized. With the help of her attorney the boy’s mother received permission to visit him in the hospital. Before the raid he had been a talkative, robust child, full of energy and climbing on everything. Now his ribs protruded from his shrunken chest, and he was weak and pale. He looked at his mother through tear-filled eyes and reached for her. As she held him close, he cried a low, pathetic cry. When told that it was time for his mother to go, he clung to her and cried inconsolably.

A physician in Alvin, Texas, addressed his concern in a letter to Governor Rick Perry on April 27 concerning another child who had to be hospitalized:

I’m a physician at a small Emergency Room. Tonight I saw one of the children from the FLDS compound who was recently bused to a nearby community. I want to express to you my extreme concern about this baby and all of the very young children in this current situation. The child I saw was under two years old, has been separated from her mother and all familiar adults, taken away from familiar surroundings, and been the subject of intense scrutiny which the child can’t understand. Now the child is ill. I have never seen such a listless, subdued, sad toddler in my life. She doesn’t eat well and her caretaker thinks she may have been breastfed at home as she has so much trouble with bottles. She is losing weight. She doesn’t play with things. She is almost non-responsive to the strange adults around her. This is a child in profound mourning for the loss of her mother, who is sick and by all appearances is going to get sicker.

Why on earth can this mother not be here to comfort this baby? I am not exaggerating in the least when I say this child looks like she wants to die….Please do something to reunite at least these small infants with their mothers. This is so wrong.

One of the disputed minors observed the trauma to which the children were subjected in the absence of their mothers:

I watched CPS workers yell at these children who have never been yelled at before. I saw workers who didn’t know how to change a diaper or make a formula bottle…. Many children had accidents because of the long wait to use the restroom…. One little girl in our section…, a 13 month old nursing baby, was given cow’s milk, which she would not drink. Her little precious face searched everyone trying to find her mother. She cried and cried and finally cried herself to sleep at about 10:00 p.m., hungry, sad, and confused. She was laid in her crib. I walked by to check on her and found her asleep with her shoes still on. I felt her diaper, which was very full, and she was lying on top of her sippy cup leaking milk.

One of the MHMR workers documented a few of the incidents she observed after the separation:

A baby was left in a stroller without food and water for 24 hours and ended up in the hospital. A 4 year old boy was so terrified that he snuck away and hid and was only found after the coliseum and [sic] been emptied the next day.

I witnessed a small boy, maybe 3 years old, walking along the rows of cots with a little pillow saying, “I need someone to rock me, I just want to be rocked, I want to find a rocking chair.” Two CPS workers were following him and writing in their notebooks but not speaking to him or comforting him. Sally and I started toward him but his 8 year old brother came and picked him up saying, “I will take care of him.” He took the child to a rocking chair and held him in his lap. That little boy will always be in my mind. How can a beautiful healthy child be taken from a healthy, loving home and forced into a situation like that, right here in America, right here in Texas? (MHMR Letter #2)

The abuse to which the children were subjected included at times an almost mocking disregard for the religious teachings under which they had been raised. One young mother wrote

I noticed a large group of older boys and girls, ages 5-9 or so, gathered around some workers; so I went over there and these two male workers were showing these children all the tattoos on their bodies—pulling up their shirts, baring their chests and backs, and halfway down their backsides to show them these disgusting figures and emblems on their bodies. I could only stand in silence, tears flowing down my cheeks as I saw the amazement on the faces of these innocent children. I felt so sick, physically and spiritually…

Even after they had been apprised of the special dietary requirements of some of the children, CPS workers often ignored the instructions they had been given. Before she was removed from the Coliseum, One mother told CPS workers that her three daughters were allergic to milk, wheat, and eggs, also recording this information on their bracelets. Their older brother kept telling the workers these foods would make his sisters sick and even wrote a note and gave it to a CPS worker. One of the girls, who was made to eat hot dogs with white flour buns and other foods she was allergic to, became sicker and sicker, experiencing terrible stomach cramps and vomiting. A CPS worker later told the mother that she had arrived on the scene just as other workers were rushing the girl to the hospital. She was unresponsive and pale with a half-smile, glazed eyes, a blank stare, and a fever of 103 degrees. The workers were saying, “Hurry, she is going down fast.” The mother blamed her daughter’s illness on the wrong type of foods, stress, not enough water, and her becoming chilled during the two nights when CPS took all the blankets and sleeping bags. When the girl was brought back from the hospital, she was not reunited with her older brother as he had been promised she would be, and CPS workers would not even tell him where his sister was although he asked repeatedly. Another mother who later rode on a bus with the girl told the mother that she was still sick and pale from the wrong type of food and was suffering from severe stomach cramps.

The children were removed from the Coliseum on April 25. CPS workers set up black tarps to shield the eating area from the rest of the Coliseum. The children were organized into groups, one group at a time going in to eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner. After they had finished their meal, the children were loaded onto a waiting bus without being seen by the other children. In this way brothers and sisters were separated and scattered in 17 foster-care facilities all across the state of Texas. Over the next several weeks, many parents literally lived on the road, as some of them traveled an 1800-mile circuit to make brief visits with each child.

At a news conference at the main gate of the San Angelo Fairgrounds about a half hour after the last of the children had been removed, Darrell Azar, communications director for Texas Family and Protective Services, praised the way the separation of families was proceeding. “It’s a very good day for the children,” he said. “They’re on their way to foster care, where they will be safe and protected and have their needs met.”

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