Eldorado search warrants detail seizure of multiple items
 
By Brian West
Deseret News
 
SAN ANGELO, Texas — Texas authorities released Friday more than 80 pages detailing a multitude of items seized from a ranch of Fundamentalist LDS Church members.

Among those items were medical files and photographs of girls and women with the same name of the purported 16-year-old pregnant young mother who called a crisis hotline from the ranch to say she was being physically and sexually abused.

Authorities still have not been able to determine if the girl is among the 416 children that were removed from the ranch over the past week and placed into state custody.

At least four medical files for patients with the same or similar name were seized, as well as "laboratory receipts" for several different girls with the same name.

Judge Barbara Walther ruled earlier this week that all of the evidence will be stored for safekeeping until a yet-to-be-identified third party can sift through it to determine if any of the items should be protected under an attorney-client privilege or a clergy-parishioner privilege.

Photographs, family photos, photo albums, hand-written notes, computer hard drives, laptop computers, ordinance and birth records and many journals were all listed in the documents filed in court.

One of the more unusual items listed as taken was a "cyanide poisoning document."

At least two videotapes of SWAT teams making entry into the temple were also seized from the compound, according to the documents.

Officers also took a video from a birthing room as well as cell phones, cameras, pedigree charts, and contents from a shredder. Thursday, Texas Rangers Capt. Barry Caver said he couldn't determine whether any documents had been shredded during the search or sometime before it.

The search warrants authorized police officers to confiscate any information that will help state officials better determine the identities of the 416 children taken from the ranch as well as who their parents are. They were ordered to take any photographs or device that could potentially store photographs, such as cell phones.

Flash drives, Books of Mormon, children's notebooks, temple clothes and several listings of "white clothing" were also listed. Other clothing items were taken such as dress shoes, suit jackets, ties, etc.

The documents do not specify where each item was taken from the 1,700-acre YFZ Ranch, which is in Eldorado, Texas.

The warrant also lists several pages of "miscellaneous documents" from cardboard boxes as well as bishop's records, "prison mail," "Warran Jeff records," "mail from Canadian Saints" and "mail from houses in hiding."

Warren Jeffs, the sect's leader, is currently in an Arizona jail awaiting trial on two separate cases. He was convicted last year in Utah of rape by accomplice for his role in an underage marriage of a 14-year-old to her 19-year-old cousin.

E-MAIL: bwest@desnews.com
 
deseretnews.com
Originally published Friday, April 11, 2008
 
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