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They
could be sisters, or certainly cousins, these two pretty redheads
curled up on a sectional sofa in a North Phoenix "safe house." Both
of their names are Fawn, and together, they're known as "the two
Fawns" - as though they're lost baby deer. And in a sense, they are,
these two runaways from the polygamist community of Colorado City,
which straddles the Arizona-Utah border.
They say they ran and sought safety with
strangers because they feared that their families would marry them
off to old men against their will; that they'd be wife No. 3 or No.
5, and would spend the rest of their lives with the "sister wives"
who take turns being bedded by the man of the house. They feared
that they'd be reduced to nothing but "breeding machines" - all in
the name of a cult disguised as a religion.
These young girls say they know there must
be more on the outside - that girls out here can get an education,
can have a say in their own lives, can be spared from a culture
where sex with a child is not only condoned, but encouraged. They
say they had to flee to survive.
They come from a very strange, closed
community of fundamentalists who have been excommunicated from the
Mormon Church. People there believe a man can't enter heaven without
having had at least three wives, and a woman can't get there at all
without having been married to a polygamist man.
Polygamy is the heart and soul of Colorado
City, which was called Short Creek back in the 1950s, when Arizona
last tried to do something about the city's unlawful multiple
marriages. Today, Colorado City has the largest concentration of
polygamists in North America.
This is a strict society in a remote corner
of Mohave County, where men rule with an iron hand in the name of
God - men who father hundreds of children and then are supported by
millions of dollars of welfare.
This is a demanding society that forbids
radio and television, limits education for its children, and demands
total obedience to a man who calls himself a "living prophet."
This is an insulated society where
inter-marriage is so prevalent that most of the young girls resemble
the two Fawns. It's a society where young men aren't seen as the
future of the community, but as competition for the old men
interested in the young girls - the young men are often forced out
of town.
This is a settlement and a way of life that
is very hard for outsiders to understand. And the two Fawns are the
latest evidence that many insiders don't want to live this way,
either.
So, these 16-year-olds ran. Friends of
friends found them a safe house in Utah. Then, a Valley activist
swooped in with TV crews in tow to take them to Phoenix, where a
friendly woman gave them shelter.
And it was on the heads of these two little
girls that the state of Arizona had finally staked its claim to end
decades of negligence or indifference to what happens every day
inside the cult on the Arizona Strip - child abuse, rape, bigamy,
slavery.
But once again, Arizona failed miserably.
And the girls ran from the state with the same fear they felt when
they ran from their parents.
One lawmaker who has fought for years to
draw attention to Colorado City and the plight of girls like the two
Fawns says it amounts to "the Taliban in our own back yard."
The
first few days after they ran, the two Fawns had no idea they'd
be-come the rallying cry for a new resolve to save the children of
Colorado City.
They had more immediate needs. They'd left
with only the shirts on their backs, and if one of their boyfriends
hadn't given them some money, they'd have been penniless. They had
no toothpaste or deodorant. They didn't even have a comb for their
long red hair.
The night they ran in mid-January was the
first night they'd ever slept outside their parents' homes. They
arrived in Phoenix in the middle of the night - a city with more
lights than either girl had ever seen in her lifetime. They were
left with a woman they'd never met, and all the while they were sure
the mighty power of Colorado City would appear and take them back.
And, of course, they knew very well that the state of Arizona had a
lousy record of dealing with runaways from their town - normally
turning the girls back to their parents under the theory that
"family reunification" was the primary goal of Child Protective
Services (CPS).
The girls were so needy and scared that
they bonded almost instantly with the stranger who offered them
protection - within 24 hours, they were calling this woman "mom."
Meeting with state officials, however, was different. Their first
meeting went very badly - although the attorney general's office had
promised that the girls could stay in the safe house, the CPS worker
hadn't gotten the message and told them they'd have to go to a group
home. So, they fled again, running from that meeting while the
adults trying to help them placed frantic phone calls to clear
things up.
The day after that encounter, the girls
were told the CPS worker had simply been mistaken, and they could
stay with "mom." But they were still skittish and nervous.
They were lounging at either end of the
sectional in the safe house. The television was on, and they were
watching it curiously. Slowly, haltingly, with fragmented sentences,
they started talking about how lousy their lives had been.
Then the phone rang and the safe house
"mother" took the call. "We have to go," she announced with some
urgency. "Your parents are meeting with CPS, and we don't trust them
to not tell where you are."
The girls gave each other frightened looks,
and needed no prodding to jump up. They stuck their stockinged feet
into shoes and the safe house mother grabbed her purse. Everyone
ended up on the patio of a Sonic restaurant - "What's a Sonic?" the
girls asked.
They each ordered large peanut-butter fudge
shakes and shared mozzarella sticks. And then they told stories that
make you want to cry.
Penny
Peterson knows everything the two Fawns have to say, because she
experienced it all 20 years ago when she, herself, was a runaway.
Today, she's a Phoenix mother of five, with
a loving husband and a new home and a life that has brought back the
infectious laugh that had been beaten out of her in Colorado City.
And she's become Arizona's most effective
tool in fighting polygamy.
"I have 39 brothers and sisters, three
mothers, one dad," she says. "My mother was wife No. 1, and she has
18 children. I was the wild child - always hyper, a tomboy, my dad's
favorite. He always said, 'I'll never be broke because I'll always
have a Penny left.' He was everything to me; he was like my God; I
worshiped him. My mom would beat the shit out of me, I think because
she was jealous. Then I was 12 or 13 when he molested me."
She went to her mother, Rose Stubbs, with
the devastating news about her father, David. "She let him beat me
with bailing wire," Penny remembers, and she winces as she utters
the words.
She knew then, she says, that she was on
her own.
She already had a good look at what life in
this community was like. "It might look like Mayberry on the outside
- everyone happy and smiling - but that's not what it's like inside
those homes," she says. "The stress level is so high. The wives are
bitterly jealous of each other - vicious to one another. You've got
moms beating on the other mother's kids. And the work is darn hard.
When I was 9 years old I was taking care of 22 kids for weeks at a
time. For those inside, this is all they know. The world out here is
like a twilight zone."
Her one release "from all the crap" was the
horse she'd wildly ride through the hills around Colorado City - an
ugly, unkempt town set in a breathtaking stand of mountains. And she
started running away - one time, she even got as far as Flagstaff.
But she was always found and taken home.
She says she does have one happy memory
about growing up there. That is, until she starts to think about it.
"The greatest day for a girl in Colorado
City is when you have your eighth-grade graduation," she says. "You
get to wear a fancy dress like a prom dress. Your hair is all fixed
up. That is your day. I had a hot-pink taffeta dress, a little
Cinderella dress - it almost got me kicked out of graduation, but my
mom did stand up for me, and I got to go. Here were all these girls
as pretty as they could be, and we were so proud of ourselves. And
only later did I realize all those old men were sitting there
checking out the fresh meat."
She knew what was planned next. "After
eighth-grade graduation, we know that we'll be married off, and we
just cross our fingers and pray he is not old, wrinkly, mean and
ugly."
Penny saw her worst fears coming true when
her 15-year-old best friend was married off to a 48-year-old man who
she calls "a jerk."
"He raped her on their wedding night, and
every night after. He said he wanted me to be his bride, too. I
decided, no way - I'd die or get out of here before he touches me."
She called friends she'd made in Las Vegas,
where her dad often took his kids to sell wood and hay at swap
meets. Penny's friends drove out, bringing guns just in case, and
then took Penny home with them. For the next couple of years, she
earned her way doing odd jobs, always fearing someone would come
along and drag her back to Colorado City.
She finally made a deal with her dad - she
sent him half her paycheck, and he promised to let her stay out.
And then eight years ago, her father came
asking for Penny's help. "Two of my little sisters, just 12 and 14
years old, were being courted by Orson William Black," she says. "He
was 43, and already had four wives, including my older sister,
Rosie."
"Black believes he's his own prophet and my
mother is one of his followers. She is trying to get all her
daughters married to him. Dad opposed the marriages because he
thought Roberta and Beth were too young." But her dad was helpless
to stop the marriages because her mother had gotten a restraining
order against him to keep him away from the girls.
So Penny got on the phone and called anyone
she thought might help: CPS, the FBI, the IRS. "I was giving
information and telling them anything they wanted to know," she
remembers. "The FBI and IRS came and interviewed me, but they didn't
help. CPS stopped taking my calls."
Roberta was 12 when Black married her and "hid her away"; she had a
3-year-old son before any of her family saw her again, and when they
did, they couldn't believe it was the same girl. "Roberta was always
a beautiful tomboy, but he messed her up," Penny says. "She can't
even create a sentence, her mind is gone."
Black married Beth when she was 14. "My mom wanted it and pushed it.
This whole time, I'm screaming to anybody who'd listen," Penny says.
Nobody was listening.
So Penny decided to build the case against Black the only way she
knew how: She went "undercover," befriending her mother and sister,
Rosie, pretending she didn't oppose Black; milking the women for
information. She discovered even more devastating news: Rosie had
previously been married and had I0 children before marrying Black.
She now offered him her own 13-year-old daughter, Sally Beth,
Penny's niece. Penny alerted CPS, "but they screwed up again," and
the next day, Black fled to Mexico with his ever-growing family.
Since then, Penny has learned Rosie has offered yet another daughter
to her husband, a girl named Vashti, who's just turned 13.
Last year, the state of Arizona indicted
Black on five felony counts of child abuse and bigamy. The charges
are pending because Black is now a fugitive, living somewhere in
Mexico.
It might not sound like much, Penny admits,
but you have to put it in perspective: "These were the first charges
in Arizona in 50 years!" Behind her eyes, it's obvious that she's
mentally calculating how many Beths and Robertas were lost in all
those decades.
"I wanted justice for my sisters."
And then her sister Ruth showed up at the
door of her Phoenix home.
"Ruth was a beautiful girl - healthy,
vivacious, full of piss and vinegar. But she shows up here
devastated, rundown, dark-eyed. The first couple months she slept,
and I took care of her and her two kids."
Ruth had been married off at 16 as the
third "spiritual wife" of Rodney Holm, a police officer in Colorado
City who lived on the Utah side of town. By now, Penny had a whole
rolodex of numbers for Arizona officials. She called them, and they
called Utah, which prosecuted Holm for bigamy and unlawful sex with
a minor.
He was convicted. "He got a year's jail
time, and they let him out on work release," Penny says with
disgust. "Big whoopty-do. Talk about a slap in the face."
"These men hide behind the skirts of
polygamy - they call it their religion," Penny notes. "In their
minds, it's normal to check out 13-year-old girls. That's what
they're taught. But to me, it's not far to go from there to messing
around with 12- or 11- or 10-year-olds, or messing around with your
own young daughter. It's just more and more perverse."
The longer she talks about the culture of
polygamy, the angrier she gets: "Women are worth nothing - they're
basically cattle. A man owns five or six and has as many calves as
he can - the more you have the bigger stud you are. It gives them
braggin' rights. And somewhere in their twisted minds, they think
this means they'll get into celestial heaven."
If she could save them all - all those
girls who are taught they have only one option in life and have no
say over their futures - she'd do this: "I'd educate all the kids in
public schools; no one would be allowed to marry under the age of
18, and I'd give the girls a choice - if you did that, you'd abolish
polygamy right there. An educated 18-year-old who has a choice isn't
going to want to be somebody's third or fifth wife."
And she's not giving up on nabbing William
Black. "The most important thing to me is I need to get him brought
to justice. Pretty soon, he'll run out of my nieces, but he's not
going to stop. He's sick."
For
as long as she can remember, 16-year-old Fawn Holm has been taught
that if she didn't obey the prophet, she'd burn in hell. "Fawn,
you're sick in the brain, and you're going to hell," she remembers
her father, Carl, snarling at her.
Her immediate family includes her mother,
Esther, who had 19 children - Fawn being the youngest - and a second
mother named Venita, who is her mother's niece and is the mother of
15 children.
She has nothing nice to say about her
father. "I don't know him," she says. "I never loved him, so I tried
to stay away. Every morning at six he makes all the kids get up for
song and prayer and reading. One day I wouldn't get out of bed, and
he was shaking my butt and pulled me out, and I hurt my back. But
father said he had an inspiration that I shouldn't go to the doctor.
I'm still in a lot of pain."
And then she makes a declaration that shows
she knows exactly why she ran: "I'm not his property - he told me he
could do whatever he wants because I'm his property."
She complains that her father never showed
her love, was always "trying to make my life miserable," and took
her out of school because "he told me that girls didn't need to go
to school." And he was very clear in his message about her worth:
"My dad would always be telling us girls to prepare ourselves to be
married."
She remembers she never fit in and was
often in trouble. "I'd let my hair hang [girls are supposed to wear
braids], and I wore pants once and really got in trouble [girls are
supposed to wear clothes that cover them from neck to ankle]. People
said we were the whores of the town. They don't even know what the
word means. We just yelled back, 'Yeah man.'"
Part of her contrary behavior was a
survival technique. From watching the community, teenagers know
this: Very bad kids are married off early so they can't leave the
community; good kids are willingly married off at 14, but "kind of
bad" kids are made to wait until at least 16 for marriage so they
can be trained to be good kids.
From where she sat, Fawn Holm saw being
"kind of bad" as a good thing.
But the other embedded lesson she learned
was that the prophet was godly. Fawn remembers that when her father
read the Bible, he would substitute Prophet Warren Jeffs' name for
the Biblical characters, including Jesus. She does know about the
"heavenly father," Mary, Jesus, heaven and hell, but has never heard
of purgatory, or mortal and venial sins.
Some of the prophet's notions have left her
with a distorted look at love and marriage: "You're not supposed to
love for love, you're supposed to love for the priesthood the men
hold," she says. And at first, you think she knows that it's
misguided. But then she adds this: "The heavenly father gave sex to
us to have children. I believe sex isn't a fun thing to do - it's
something you do to have children."
But she is clear - incredibly clear - that
she has no interest in going back to Colorado City.
"I'm scared of what they'll do to me if I
have to go back," she says. "They'll keep us locked up until we
decide to get married. I'm sick of being scared. I'm sick of them
telling me I'm going to hell. They're not even my family anymore. I
don't even miss them. It's sad to say, but I don't."
She's asked what she'd do if her parents
showed up right now, and she throws a frightened look at the street
running in front of the Sonic. "I would run," she says with anger in
her eyes. She's asked what she'd like to say to her family if she
could safely address them, and she flashes her two middle fingers in
a crude gesture of defiance.
After she calms down, she says she'd like
to tell them: "I proved you wrong. You always told me if I tried to
leave it wouldn't work. But I'm going to make it work."
She wants to get a job so she can support
herself until she gets married and has a family and raises them
"like I never was raised."
She never wants a polygamist family, but
doesn't condemn those for whom it works. "If they want to do it - if
they're happy that way and the man loves them both, then they should
do whatever makes them happy."
She says she just wants a chance for
happiness herself.
Later, a call to her family home in
Colorado City is answered by a woman. A baby is crying in the
background. Upon hearing that a reporter is on the other end, doing
a story about Fawn, the woman hangs up.
But the mother of the second Fawn - Fawn
Broadbent - doesn't hang up. She wants to talk about a daughter she
doesn't expect to see much anymore.
"I've
known she didn't want to be part of our community, and that was fine
- they have a choice," Catherine Broad-bent says over the phone. "I
just asked her to wait until she was 18 so she'd be old enough to
support herself." But her daughter was too impatient to wait, she
adds.
"She doesn't want to come back, and she's
not going to be forced to," says the mother of 14, who is the only
wife of Matthew Broadbent.
She approves of her daughter being adopted
by the other Fawn's brother, who now lives in Salt Lake City after
having left Colorado City years ago. Although she doesn't know him,
she has talked with his wife and feels comfortable they'd be good to
her daughter. "It's way better than just [being] on the street," she
says.
What does she want people to know about her
daughter? "She really is a sweetheart. Anybody who gets to know her
knows she's just sweet. We'll miss her."
But even though the family will know where
Fawn will be living, Mrs. Broadbent doesn't expect much contact.
"Salt Lake is quite far, we have limited income, and I don't foresee
us doing much together," she says. "I hope she calls me and lets me
know she's OK." She says her daughter has promised to phone
regularly.
"I love her, and I want her to be happy and
safe - and I'm not saying it's not safe here because it is; but
that's a personal, religious choice and every person has the right
to choose. That's what America's about. I am strong in my belief,
and I think if everyone did understand, then they'd feel the same
way. But they don't understand, and they don't want to, and I'm not
here to convince them."
Her daughter, Fawn Louise, says she wishes
her parents had been more open to her choices before she was forced
to run. "I tried going through The Front Door, and I bet you don't
even know what that means," she says. "I went to the prophet and
told him I wanted to leave. That's The Front Door. I was told to
stay with my father and do what he wants. He told my dad in two
years I would be turned around. My mom says, 'The prophet says
you're going to make it,' and she meant I'd marry somebody and have
a billion kids. So I had to go out The Back Door."
She dreams of being a fashion designer, and
says she wants something very simple: "I want to be able to make
choices in my life, not be forced."
Flora
Jessop has been working to get girls like the two Fawns that simple
freedom for over a decade. She's the one who drove up to Utah that
night in mid-January to bring the girls back to Phoenix. She bought
them a week's worth of clothes when they got to town, arranged for
their safe house, and has been their protector and ally ever since.
Jessop, herself, is a runaway from Colorado
City, and she's founded a group called "Help the Child Brides."
She's a skinny little thing with a tenacity that doesn't stop. And
she's inspired more than one official to take all of this seriously.
But she hasn't been able to save the one
child who made her an activist: her little sister, Ruby. Flora ran
from Colorado City the day Ruby was born - May 3, 1986. Fourteen
years later, Flora was devastated to learn that Ruby had been
married off to an older man. Ruby eventually fled, but was found by
members of the church and taken back. Flora tried to alert officials
that her sister had been kidnapped, but they did little to help.
Because of Flora's constant agitating,
members of the polygamist community - officially known as the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - were
forced to take Ruby to Utah officials, where the frightened girl
said everything was fine and was sent back. Flora says she knows
that Ruby has had at least one child, but she hasn't had any news of
her little sister in a couple of years.
And so she tries to save other girls -
tries to alert others in power that something must be done.
One person she's convinced is state Senator
Linda Bender of Lake Havasu City, whose blood pressure visibly rises
when she talks about the goings-on in the polygamist community of
her district. "It's so disgusting, you can't believe this is
happening," she says. "It's total bondage and slavery. We yell at
other countries about their treatment of women and children, but we
have the equivalent of the Taliban in our own back yard."
She's been trying to amend Arizona's
criminal code to make polygamy a crime - it's forbidden by the
constitution, but there's no correlating criminal penalty. So far,
she's been rebuffed by a Legislature where several leaders can trace
their own family histories of polygamy.
Flora has also influenced Valley author
Betty Webb, whose 2002 novel, Desert Wives: Polygamy Can Be Murder,
got incredible national reviews, but was totally ignored by the
local press.
Publishers Weekly said, "This book
could do for polygamy what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for slavery." The
New York Times said, "If Betty Webb had gone undercover and written
Desert Wives as a piece of investigative journalism, she'd probably
be up for the Pulitzer."
Yet, she says she got zero coverage in
Arizona, where the book is set, and where its fictional location is
really Colorado City.
Webb says she's still mystified why Arizona
has been so complacent for so long, especially since the welfare
fraud is costing state taxpayers millions of dollars.
"The prophets are no better than pimps
because polygamy is all about money - it's about old men making
money off these girls," she says. Because polygamy is illegal, the
men legally marry only one woman, taking the rest as "spiritual
wives," who are considered single in the eyes of the state, so their
offspring are eligible for welfare payments, Webb explains. "The
longer the breeding life, the more money there is - if you don't
breed until the girl is 20, you missed out on having seven kids that
can collect welfare."
Webb says she's encouraged the media is now
focused on this issue, but worries that it won't last. "I think as
soon as the din dies down, everybody will go back to their own lives
and forget about it."
But two local reporters are trying to assure that doesn't happen:
Mike Watkiss of Channel 3 and John Dougherty of Phoenix New Times.
Watkiss, who has been covering this story
almost from the day he began his journalism career 25 years ago in
Utah, was born a mainstream Mormon - a religion that once practiced
polygamy but renounced it so Utah could be admitted to the Union in
1896. He can look back at great-grandfathers who were polygamists,
but that's not what sparked his interest in investigating polygamy.
"I was furious at how this story was
covered by the national media," he says. "They treated it like a
giggle, 'Oh, here's a guy with six wives, how does he do it?' I knew
it wasn't funny. This is child abuse, this is sex exploitation, this
is no different than the Taliban - they just don't take them into
the public square and behead them."
Dougherty has been on the story, too. For
the last year, he's been producing one probing story after another,
unmasking the sins of Colorado City. In fact, he actually moved to
that area to devote himself to the story. "I'd spend the day going
through public records and the nights trying to meet with families
in their homes," he says.
Dougherty has filed more than 70
public-record requests, documenting the millions of tax dollars
spent each year to support the "pligs" (short for "polygamist pigs,"
an offensive slang word that's used both inside and outside the
community). "Arizona is spending over $10 million [in welfare, food
stamps, and health and education benefits] in Colorado City alone,"
he says. Utah is spending about the same amount in the companion
city of Hildale.
He also discovered that polygamists had
removed all their children from the public school system, but still
controlled the school, and are "looting it blind." The district is
about to go under from the squandering of taxpayer money, including
the purchase of a $220,000 Cessna 210 airplane.
He found that 33 percent of the town's
residents receive food stamps, compared to the state average of 4.7
percent. All in all, the people in Colorado City receive $8 in
government services for every dollar they pay in taxes. (Elsewhere
in Mohave County, folks receive about a dollar of services for every
dollar in taxes they pay.)
"All America should be concerned about what
happens when religion runs rough-shod over civic authority; that's
what's happening in Colorado City," Dougherty says.
It didn't take him long to understand why
this community gets away with it. "Colorado City votes in a bloc,"
he says. "You have 1,000 to 1,500 votes - that's pretty powerful in
a small county."
But you don't have to resort to political
conspiracy theories to understand why these men and their taste for
little girls have gone unpunished. All you have to do is remember
the name Short Creek.
Arizona
and Utah officials - including the Quorum of Twelve Apostles of the
mainstream Mormon Church - have repeatedly tried to stamp out the
polygamist colony known as Colorado City, a place formerly known as
Short Creek.
On July 26, 1953, Arizona Governor Howard
Pyle ordered a pre-dawn raid on Short Creek by the Arizona National
Guard, police and county officers. They rounded up 122 polygamous
men and women, whose 260-some children were bused to foster homes in
Kingman, some 400 miles away.
Pyle explained the unprecedented raid in a
public statement: "Here is a community - many of the women, sadly,
right along with the men - unalterably dedicated to the wicked
theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the
bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole
purpose of producing more children to be reared to become more
chattels of this totally lawless enterprise."
As righteous as that sounded - as much as
Mormon officials had helped plan the raid, as much as the Deseret
News lauded Pyle for helping clean up Short Creek "once and for
all" - most of the country saw the raid as religious persecution.
Papers around the country ran photographs
of crying children being wrenched from their parents, and the men
and women of the community gave interviews complaining they were
law-abiding citizens just trying to practice their religion in a
nation where freedom of religion is sacrosanct.
Arizona's largest and most influential
paper of the day, The Arizona Republic, criticized the raid as "a
misuse of public funds."
Short Creek destroyed Pyle's political
career. The next year he was voted out of office. Within three
years, all those arrested had been released from jail, were reunited
with their families, and resumed their polygamous lives.
And adding salt to the wound, the little
400-resident town of Short Creek soon attracted new converts to the
fundamentalist cult that knew further government interference was
unlikely. Today, Colorado City and Hildale have some 9,000 residents
combined.
For the past 50 years, it's basically been
hands-off, as every government official feared "the ghost of Short
Creek."
But now things have started to change,
thanks in part to the tenacity of a few journalists, the courage of
a few girls, the strength of a handful of activists, the attorney
general of Utah and the newest player in the battle, Arizona
Attorney General Terry Goddard.
In
early February, the first Arizona official to publicly address a
news conference about Colorado City in five decades stood behind the
microphone and told the crowd, "I will not tolerate child abuse."
Attorney General Terry Goddard also made it very clear where he
wasn't going to go: "This is not an issue of religion, it's not an
issue of culture, it's not an issue of lifestyle. First and
foremost, this is an issue of child safety."
Goddard has taken a bill to the Legislature
that will make "child bigamy" a felony - if passed, it would punish
both parents and men who marry or cohabitate with a minor.
He's also asking lawmakers for more money
to hire attorneys who can specialize in rural law enforcement. And
he's pushing for a "public safety facility" in Colorado City where
teens who want to escape can go. As it is, the remoteness of
Colorado City makes running away or seeking help very difficult.
Goddard notes that since last fall's
special legislative session, CPS has a new focus: No longer is
"family reunification" the first priority, but instead, it's "child
safety." He said he hopes that message reaches Col-orado City to
help overcome "50 years of distrust."
But what eventually happens to the "two
Fawns" will say more than any pronouncement or good intention.
On
Valentine's Day, the two Fawns each penned letters to their
safe-house "mother" and to Flora Jess-op, who'd rescued them.
They left the letters behind as they fled
once again, and their words clearly explain why: "I was hoping that
Arizona would help me," Fawn Holm wrote, "but I thought wrong…. I
left because all they seem to want to do is send us back to… like
prison. Well, I won't go back, so I guess I'm going to be running
until I'm 18. I can't thank you guys enough, but thanks for trying."
Fawn Louise Broadbent wrote this: "I am
afraid I will be sent back to Colorado City, and I do not want to go
back because I will be locked up and even married. I am not happy
with CPS because they are not doing their job and are lying… I need
some help so I can have a life."
Their safe-house mother reports that
officials from CPS and the attorney general's office both frightened
the girls into believing they would be sent back or sent to a
lockdown group home in Mohave County. CPS officials have said they
had no intention of sending the girls back.
But the safe-house mother says she'd like
to confront officials with this question: "All we ever asked for was
a guarantee that you wouldn't send them back, and you never gave it
- how can you now tell the media that, when you wouldn't tell it to
the girls?"
Waiting
in the wings is a gentle, patient man from Salt Lake City who hopes
he'll be al-lowed to adopt both of the Fawns - one is his blood
sister, the other is her friend.
Carl Holm and his wife, Joni, rushed to
Arizona when Flora Jessop called to say his baby sister had run from
Colorado City. "What can I do to help?" he remembers asking her.
"She asked if I'd take them, and I said, 'Yes, of course.'"
Carl Holm fled Colorado City himself some
20 years ago.
"I know what goes on down there, and I
don't want Fawn to have to go through that," he says. ' He was about
8 years old when he realized his "normal" family wasn't nor- mal
anymore. "I woke up one morning, and a lady's purse was on the
kitchen table, and my mother was sleeping on the sofa, and someone
was with my dad." He was told, "This is your second mother - call
her Aunt Venita," and he remembers his bafflement.
But for the past 20 years, he's been
estranged from a family that includes 39 children. "Even though I
have this huge family, I don't have a family," he says sadly. "My
wife and I have four daughters - they're my only family:"
Carl Holm says he rejected all religion for
a while, unable to get rid of the "sour, bitter taste," but three
years ago converted to mainstream Mormonism. And last November, his
daughter was married in the Temple in Salt Lake City: "That was a
really big and proud moment for us," he says, as his wife nods her
head in agreement. "My parents wouldn't come. They wouldn't even
come to the reception. That really hurt.
"What I want to give to Fawn [is the
understanding that] at least she has a brother. I'll help both girls
get an education, will give them a place to live, will feed them and
will be a family to them."
Carl Holm is a maintenance mechanic with
one daughter still at home. He acknowledges that taking on two more
teenagers will be a financial hardship. "I have the support of my
church," he notes. "Our Ward has given us beds, and will help with
whatever is needed."
He knows it will be a significant job to take in these two girls and
bring them into adulthood. "My sister is five years socially behind
her age," he says. "And she hates her family: I know the feeling.
There was a time I hated them so bad I wanted to kill. But she has
to get over the hatred, or it will just eat her up."
He promises to be there to help.
But he knows - as more and more people are
beginning to understand - that there's a whole community on the
Arizona Strip where thousands of other girls like the two Fawns are
still in real danger.
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