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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS