Up to 1,000 teenage boys have been separated from their parents and thrown out of their communities by a polygamous sect to make more young women available for older men, Utah officials claim.
Many of these "Lost Boys," some as young as 13, have simply been dumped on the side of the road in Arizona and Utah, by the leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), and told they will never see their families again or go to heaven.
The 10,000-strong FLDS, which broke away from the Mormon church in 1890 when the mainstream faith disavowed polygamy, believes a man must marry at least three women to go to heaven. The sect appeared to be in turmoil on Monday, after its assets were frozen last week and a warrant was issued in Arizona on Friday for the arrest of its autocratic leader, Warren Jeffs, for arranging a wedding between an underage girl and a 28-year-old man who was already married.
Jeffs is also being sued by lawyers for six of the Lost Boys for conspiracy to purge surplus males from the community, and by his nephew, Brent Jeffs, who accuses him of sexual abuse.
Warren Jeffs' whereabouts yesterday were uncertain, but Utah officials said they believed he may be hiding in an FLDS compound near Eldorado, Texas, and they have contacted the Texan authorities.
Some have voiced concern that an attempt to corner the sect leader could provoke a tragedy like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas.
Jim Hill, an investigator in Utah's attorney general's office, said on Monday: "From everything I've been able to discern about Warren Jeffs, he is someone who is capable of some very different things. Whether that includes a mass suicide, I don't know. But I worry about it all the time."
FLDS officials and the sect's lawyer, Rodney Parker, did not return calls seeking comment, but have previously argued that the Lost Boys were exiled from their communities because they were teenage delinquents who refused to keep the sect's rules.
Hill said although the boys may have been rebellious, their expulsion had more to do with the ruthless sexual arithmetic of a polygamous sect.
"Obviously if you're going to have three to one or four to one female to male marriages, you're going to run out of females. The way of taking care of it is selectively casting out those you don't want to be in the religion," the investigator said.
Dave Bills, who runs Smiles for Diversity, a foundation in Salt Lake City set up by an ex-FLDS member to look after the Lost Boys, said it was difficult to estimate their numbers because they had been scattered. But Bills said the figures could be "as low as 400 and as high as 1,000."
"They live every day like it's their last day and they don't care about anything," Bills said. "They're told they won't have three wives, and they're doomed. But they all want to go back to their mums."
One of the boys, Gideon Barlow, said he was expelled from a FLDS community in Colorado City, Arizona, for wearing short-sleeved shirts, listening to CDs and having a girlfriend. He said his mother rejected him on orders from the sect's leaders.
"I couldn't see how my mum would let them do what they did to me," he told the Los Angeles Times.
After his expulsion, he attempted to give her a Mother's Day present but she told him to stay away.
"I am dead to her now," he said.
Joanne Suder, a lawyer rep-resenting some of the Lost Boys in a case against the sect, said there had been "a conspiracy to excommunicate young boys to change the arithmetic so there are more young girls available for polygamy."
She said some of the boys were simply driven out of town and dumped on the side of the road, leaving them traumatized.
"I think anyone who finds themselves ousted from the only environment they ever knew and left in the middle of nowhere ... and is led to believe that they can no longer go to heaven, is going to be troubled," Suder said.
A missing fingertip offers a clue to Mako Nishimura’s criminal past as one of Japan’s few female yakuza, but after clawing her way out of the underworld, she now spends her days helping other retired gangsters reintegrate into society. The multibillion-dollar yakuza organized crime network has long ruled over Japan’s drug rings, illicit gambling dens and sex trade. In the past few years, the empire has started to crumble as members have dwindled and laws targeting mafia are tightened. An intensifying police crackdown has shrunk yakuza forces nationwide, with their numbers dipping below 20,000 last year for the first time since records
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
Indonesia was to sign an agreement to repatriate two British nationals, including a grandmother languishing on death row for drug-related crimes, an Indonesian government source said yesterday. “The practical arrangement will be signed today. The transfer will be done immediately after the technical side of the transfer is agreed,” the source said, identifying Lindsay Sandiford and 35-year-old Shahab Shahabadi as the people being transferred. Sandiford, a grandmother, was sentenced to death on the island of Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs. Customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom in Sandiford’s suitcase when
RSS