Streams of women and children board busses after being removed from a
Texas ranch linked to jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs.


NEAR ELDORADO, TEXAS, UNITED STATES (APRIL 6, 2008) (NBC)

Texas officials investigating a potential child abuse case confirmed
on Sunday (April 6, 2008) that 183 children and women had been removed from
the ranch that is home to jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeff's breakaway
Mormon sect.
   According to Texas Child Protective Services, the 183 consisted of 137
children and 46 women, 
    Only 18 members of the group had been placed in the legal custody of
the state agency. 
    Buses and vans were seen driving some of the women and children from
the ranch, located near the small western Texas town of Eldorado, and more
were taken out overnight.  
     Temporary shelters have been set up in churches and government
buildings to house them.
     "Several of us went around and got diapers, pack and plays, and
cots were brought in from the Air Force base in San Angelo and sleeping bags
as well," a woman affiliated with a  local church said.
    Texas authorities descended on the ranch this week in response to
allegations a 50-year-old man there had married and fathered a child with an
underage girl.
    The ranch is a compound for the renegade Fundamentalist Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamist group led by Jeffs until last year.

    In November, Jeffs was sentenced in a Utah court to 10 years to life in
prison as an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her
19-year-old first cousin.
    He is in jail in Arizona awaiting trial on similar charges for arranged
marriages there.
    The mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the
Mormon faith is officially known, renounced polygamy more than a century ago
and tries to distance itself from breakaway factions that still practice it.