The lost boys of Colorado City

Over the past five years, a fundamentalist Mormon "prophet" has banished as many as 400 boys from his Arizona town. Now the teens, once forbidden to even watch a movie, are adrift in a world of drugs, girls and depression.

By Kimberly Sevcik

Read more: Drugs, Crime, Arizona, Teenagers, Life

Photo: Zuma Press

Photo composite of Warren Jeffs.

July 6, 2006 | On any given day there were 13 kids sleeping on the floor of the butt hut. It was 2003, and Sam Icke was almost 19. To get to work in the morning, he had to pick his way over the limp bodies, the piles of dirty clothes, the half-empty bags of Doritos. The smell of dirty socks and stale beer clung to the matted carpeting and the ratty brown sofa. Nine hours later, when he got home, Icke found those same bodies upright, fixating on a high-speed car chase on the TV in the corner, getting stoned, and doing shots of Bacardi. In the kitchen, a swarm of roaches feasted on the ossified remains of a four-day-old spaghetti dinner.

Icke was the only one in the cramped, run-down apartment with a steady job, tiling floors for $300 a week in the desert town of Hurricane, Utah. Every week or two another kid showed up at the door, looking for a place to park his ass -- that's why they called communal houses like these butt huts. Icke took them in -- no exceptions, no questions asked. He understood what they were going through. Like him, they had been banished from their homes by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a radical offshoot of the Mormon church, and forbidden to ever see their families again. Their families wept and fretted and protested under their breath, but none of them fought to keep their sons. They didn't dare defy the orders of Warren Jeffs, the dictatorial leader of FLDS, a self-proclaimed prophet whose followers believe him to be the earthly executor of God's will.

The Utah attorney general's office estimates that over the past five years, Jeffs has thrown as many as 400 boys out of Colorado City, Ariz., and a number of them have wound up in nearby towns like Hurricane, with no place to live and no resources. Most eventually find a butt hut where they can crash, but that hardly makes life in exile any easier. On a good day, they might pool their money, venture the quarter mile to Dairy Queen, buy a couple of Brazier burgers. Or try out their newfound freedom by flirting with the teenage girls who live up the street. But after growing up in the cocoon of Colorado City, where Jeffs encouraged community members to rat out their neighbors for unchurchly behavior, it is hard for them to trust anyone -- even other kids from the church.

The FLDS follows the same scripture as mainline Mormons, with one key difference: They adhere to the final revelation of their founder, Joseph Smith, instructing his followers to take multiple wives. In establishing a separatist community in Colorado City and practicing polygamy, they believe that they are the only true Mormons. The mainstream Mormon church, for its part, disavows its historical connection to the FLDS the way a person might disavow a slightly deranged cousin.

Colorado City's 10,000 residents make it the most populous town in the isolated wedge of chalky red desert north of the Grand Canyon and south of the Utah border. The town straddles the two states, materializing out of nowhere along a barren stretch of highway known as the Arizona Strip. Its seclusion is no accident: After polygamy was formally renounced by the Mormon Church in 1890, the town's early settlers sought out a remote site where they could take multiple wives far from public scrutiny. Residents call it the Crick, for the creek that meanders through the center of town, and kids commonly refer to themselves as Crickers. Three-fourths of the town's residents are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints; the other quarter belong to a sect called the Centennialists, which split off from the FLDS in the 1980s, insisting that the church be governed by its traditional committee of elders rather than submit to the dictates of the prophet.

When Warren Jeffs inherited control of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 2000, following the death of his father, Rulon, the first thing he did was marry 30 of his father's youngest and prettiest wives. Then he set about tightening his reins on Colorado City, a town where the women dress like the cast of "Little House on the Prairie" and the civic leaders -- the mayor, the police chief, the superintendent of schools -- are all subject to the prophet's orders. Jeffs banned holiday celebrations, forbade followers from listening to music except for the droning spiritual chants that he himself records, and prohibited all forms of worldly entertainment, including sports -- bowling, football, even snowball fights. Colorado City was run like a theocracy, with Jeffs its ayatollah.

In order to keep tabs on his followers, Jeffs relied on the local police, who acted more like the Taliban's morality squad than keepers of the peace. The cops were essentially informants, loyal first to Jeffs and second to the state laws that they were sworn to uphold. They patrolled the community for violations of the prophet's moral code, reporting infractions to their supreme leader. They would pull kids over for alleged traffic violations, then take photographs if they found CDs or other worldly possessions, which they turned over to the Jeffs. Until last year, when government officials in Utah and Arizona began investigating charges of underage marriage and tax fraud, Colorado City was essentially allowed to thrive outside the law.

These days, though, the only restaurant in town, a family-style place called Mark Twain, is shut down. So is the gas station just down the road. The streets are deserted. Even the church parking lot is abandoned. After decades of allowing the FLDS to practice polygamy, the attorneys general of Utah and Arizona have begun cracking down on the church. Last July, they moved to dissolve the United Effort Plan, the trust controlled by Jeffs that holds all property in Colorado City, stripping him of assets reportedly worth billions. They removed two members of the police force for serving the prophet rather than the law. And a grand jury indicted Jeffs on charges that he married off an underage girl to a married man -- one of hundreds of such ceremonies he is believed to have performed over the years.

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