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It is a well-known fact by this time that the hoax calls that triggered the Texas raid on the YFZ Ranch were placed by Rozita Swinton, a thirty-three-year-old African American woman in Colorado Springs with a history of making false reports of sexual abuse. For almost two years Texas authorities have attempted to maintain the fiction that they acted in good faith in responding to these calls. The approaching hearing in Arizona on evidence seized in the raid brings into focus again the transparency of such claims, especially in the light of the way in which numerous other agencies responded to like calls received at the same time.

 

The NewBridge Family Shelter in San Angelo, Texas, was far from the only facility being phoned by Rozita shortly before the raid. Sgt. Philip Kemp of the Texas Rangers, who investigated Rozita Swinton between April 14 and April 17 of 2008, obtained, among other evidence, a copy of Rozita’s phone record as well as the hard drive to her computer.[1] She began calling the Snohomish Battered Women’s Shelter in Washington State on March 22, 2008, a week before she placed her first call to NewBridge. At the same time she began calling crisis centers in Tennessee, Colorado, and Florida and also placing calls to anti-FLDS crusader Flora Jessop. The calls to other shelters ceased after March 29, the day of her first call to NewBridge, and did not commence again until April 3, the evening of the Texas Raid. It was as though Rozita was searching for a sympathetic ear for her stories and found it in Snohomish, NewBridge, and Flora Jessop. Between March 22 and April 17 she placed thirty-five calls to the Snohomish Battered Women’s Shelter for a total of 17.6 hours, twenty-six calls to NewBridge for a total of 3.5 hours, and eighty-six calls to Flora Jessop for a total of 27.6 hours. In the same time frame, she received one call from NewBridge and twenty-five calls from Flora Jessop.[2] On March 31 Flora arranged a three-way telephone conversation between herself, “Sarah” and Detective Sam Brower, who has received over $500,000 from Dan Fischer’s Diversity Foundation to conduct investigations of the FLDS. Brower took Rozita’s phone number and turned it over to Gary Engles, Mohave County District Attorney Investigator. In this conversation “Sarah” claimed that she was being taken to Texas.[3] On March 29 and 30 she had been telling NewBridge that she was being held as a prisoner on the Ranch. 

 

The story Rozita told to Snohomish was similar to the story she told to NewBridge but with important differences that would have called into question the veracity of both sets of phone calls as soon as authorities in the two states began comparing notes. In her calls to Snohomish, she claimed that her husband Dale Barlow had moved her from Texas to Washington about three months before and taken her to the Fairhaven Downs Apartments.[4] In later calls she claimed that she had been moved to the YFZ Ranch about three weeks ago and assigned to a new husband named “Uncle Merril.” She then reported that she had been moved from the YFZ Ranch in the last few days and was not sure where she was. She claimed that Dale Barlow was living in Everett, Washington.[5]

The caller did not block her number; and when the incident was reported to the Washington State CPS, a social worker named Denette Wagner used the internet to perform a reverse search on the number, which she found was issued out of La Junta, Colorado. She also clipped to her report a news account out of Eldorado, Texas, giving details of the raid on the YFZ Ranch and the telephone calls that had triggered it.[6]

 

The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office investigated the calls. Not identifying himself as a law enforcement officer, Detective Zelaya phoned the number that had appeared each time on the answering service and asked to speak with Sarah Barlow. The female who answered the phone told him that he had the wrong number.[7] After contacting the manager of the Fairhaven Downs Apartments and determining that a Dale E. Barlow lived there, he called at the apartment and interviewed Dale and his fiancé, who was not named Sarah. He reported that Dale was cooperative, showed no signs of deception, and claimed that he had never resided in Texas.[8] On April 5, one day before the issuance of the second warrant to search the YFZ Ranch, Detective C. Leyda called the Texas Department of Safety and spoke to Detective Joe Haralson on the case. He obtained from the Washington Department of Licensing a driver’s license photo of the Dale Barlow interviewed by Detective Zelaya and emailed this to Detective Haralson in Texas, who informed him that this was not the suspect.[9] Interestingly, Detective Haralson places the date of this communication as April 7, the day after the issuance of the second search warrant.[10]

 

Sandra Woodward, a worker at the Snohomish Battered Women’s Shelter, said that she had been reluctant to report the “Sarah” calls to the Sheriff’s Office earlier because the whole incident seemed “very bizarre.” Her supervisor, Stacia Euwer, had been skeptical of the entire series of calls and had even removed another worker from the case because she felt that the worker was becoming too emotionally involved. Even that worker reported, however, that she also had been skeptical of the calls.[11]

 

Although she had not phoned other agencies since March 29, Rozita went wild on the night of the raid and began placing numerous calls to crisis centers in B.C., Canada, and in Utah as well as to the National Child Abuse Hotline and the Arizona Child Abuse Hotline.[12] There seems to have been little response to any of these calls with the exception of one placed to a safe house for girls in Mission, B.C. on April 3. The caller gave her name as “Sarah Barlow,” claiming that she was the “Sarah” who had sparked the YFZ raid and that she was being kept in an FLDS “compound” in Bountiful, B.C.[13] Jeanene Nelson, the woman who received the call, contacted the Seattle, Washington, FBI Field Office on April 9. Asked why she had not given the information to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, she said that she had but they “didn’t act like they were interested.”[14] The Seattle Field Office phoned the San Antonio Division of the FBI to find anyone who might be interested in the information, which was finally communicated to Captain Caver and Ranger Long on April 11 by Special Agent John Broadway of the FBI San Angelo Resident Agency.

 

 Other agencies that received information on the “Sarah” calls either dismissed them as a hoax or made the necessary investigation to prove that they were not credible. Only Texas chose to ignore the most obvious features of the story that could have been checked for veracity and instead assembled a small army for invasion of the YFZ Ranch.

 

In her calls to NewBridge, “Sarah” claimed that she had previously received treatment for broken ribs at the Schleicher County Medical Center. Here was an easily verifiable piece of information, but in an interview in December 2008 Ranger Long was uncertain and evasive about any attempts to check out the report. He stated that Deputy George Arispe had checked with the Medical Center but that there was no record of a Sarah Jessop being treated. He further stated that Sheriff Doran had assured him that this would not be unusual because the FLDS probably would not have used their proper names.[15] However, in a small town such as Eldorado, it is likely that any staff member who had treated a strange young lady with bruises and broken ribs would have been suspicious and reported possible abuse at the time or at least have remembered the incident if questioned about it later so that further inquiries could have discredited this element of the “Sarah” story. Later in his interview Long expressed uncertainty that Arispe had ever checked with the Medical Center at all: “To the best of my recollection. Vaguely I remember that happening.”[16]

 

At the suppression hearing in Judge Walther’s court in May 2009, Ranger Long changed his story and said that it was the prosecutor’s office that investigated the report of the broken ribs. However, an investigator for defense attorney Gerald Goldstein testified that he had checked with the Schleicher County Medical Center and found that no one from law enforcement had made any attempt to verify whether a “Sarah Barlow” had been treated for broken ribs at all. In addition, the medical facility’s records director provided an affidavit that the facility had reviewed records back to 2006 and found no such case.[17]

 

Texas authorities entered the Ranch having no physical description of the young lady they were looking for; however, Sheriff Doran admitted that he had contacts who could have obtained information about her, that is had she existed:

 

 

 

 

A similar lack of due diligence is apparent in the neglect by Ranger Long to make any attempt to locate Dale Barlow prior to the raid. Long’s own official report includes a copy of the paper he received from the Mohave County, Arizona, Sheriff’s Office, which gives pictures, physical description, address, and cell phone number of Dale Barlow as well as the name and cell phone number of Bill Loader, his probation officer.[19] Long stated in his affidavit that he believed that Dale Barlow was on the Ranch; however, the affidavit of Jessica Carroll stated that Sarah’s “husband had to go away for a while and she wanted to know why.” The intake notes of Jessica Carroll, a copy of which Ranger Long includes in his official report and claims to have reviewed prior to preparing his affidavit for a search warrant, are even more explicit on the absence of Dale Barlow from the Ranch: “Her husband—wasn’t obedient (Asked another wife about when she talked to people about when he got in trouble) & had to go away for a little bit. Wants to know why he had to go away.” Rozita gave this statement at about the same time she told the Snohomish County Shelter that she had a reassigned husband.

 

Jessica Carroll’s Contact Assessment for her first calls from “Sarah” on March 29 indicated that the caller claimed that there had been threats to kill her and the children and that she had bruises on her face, arms, and legs and had previously suffered broken ribs. Had Texas authorities taken seriously this portion of her story, they could have filled out an Exigent Circumstances request from Sprint Nextel to obtain call detail records with cell site information as well as precision location of the cell phone (GPS location). The request form includes as one of the circumstances authorizing disclosure of such information “immediate danger of death or serious bodily injury to any person.”[20]

 

Ms. Carroll may have been somewhat skeptical of the calls herself since she did not check the boxes indicating a call to 911 or notification of the police.[21] She also did not include a record of the death threats in her affidavit. Ranger Long also may have been skeptical of the calls. When questioned by Rick Wright on this issue, he responded as follows:

 

 

 

 

BL: I don’t rec—I know they checked that box and I know it was documented in the report but I don’t recall saying what, why did you check this?[22] 

 

We may have been dealing with the Keystone Cops, but this is unlikely in view of Brooks Long’s twenty years’ experience in law enforcement, which includes twelve years with the Rangers, the investigative division of the Texas Department of Public Safety.[23]  A much more likely interpretation is that Texas authorities had been waiting for some time for a plausible excuse to conduct an investigation of the YFZ Ranch and were not about to do anything that might discredit the “Sarah” story too soon. 

 

 

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