The lost boys of Colorado City

One night in 2001, when Black was 15, a cop knocked on the door of the party trailer and caught Black and his friends watching the teen horror-comedy "Scary Movie." A few days later, Black and his mother were summoned to Jeffs' compound, a monolithic beige McMansion sequestered behind a 12-foot wall plastered with No Trespassing signs.

"How are you doing, Richard?" Jeffs asked from behind the expanse of his oak desk. Jeffs had the gangly limbs of an adolescent on a growth spurt and the soft, high-pitched voice of a choir boy.

"Pretty good," Black said.

Jeff fixed his notoriously unblinking gaze on him. Then he asked if Black had anything to confess.

"Yeah," Black said. "I watched a movie."

"Anything else?" Jeffs said. "Have you had sexual thoughts about girls? Have you touched yourself? Have you touched anyone else?"

"No," Black insisted.

Jeffs sighed and leaned back in his chair. "You're not doing so well, Richard," he said, his voice ominously mild. "I think you need to pack your things and leave Colorado City and never come back."

You would think that being banished from Colorado City would be bliss for a kid like Black: pot and pornos all day, every day, in the party trailer. And girls, too -- real, live girls with visible curves, and no creepy preacher trying to guilt him out of touching them. But lying in the trailer at night, parked behind his brother's house in the town of Apple Valley, Utah, all Black really wanted was his mother.

Granted the liberty to party his ass off, Black instead found himself wallowing in a fog of alcohol and despair. He worked as a framer six days a week, from 6 in the morning until 5 at night, then went back to his trailer and drank until he passed out. There was no heat in the trailer, and in winter, he shivered beneath his blankets night after night, unable to sleep. He talked to his mother on the phone about once a week, but his sisters and his nieces were forbidden by their husbands to talk to him. He was an apostate now, the most wicked creature on earth, and they couldn't risk his polluting the minds of the righteous.

"I missed my family so bad," says Black, now 20. "I went from being surrounded by lots of people who loved me to being totally alone in the world." Some nights, he'd sit in front of the TV for hours, not watching, just staring, just to have some sound. Other nights, he'd lie in bed and plot ways to kill himself: slice open his wrists, jump off a cliff, run out in the middle of the highway, hang himself. "I could have slept on the couch in my brother's house, but I didn't want to be around nobody," he says. "I wanted to be alone and cry myself to sleep."

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As Jeffs exiled more and more boys, they began to wander the streets of neighboring towns like Hurricane, looking for work and getting into trouble. In February, five 19-year-old outcasts were arrested in St. George, Utah, for growing marijuana, selling cocaine and stealing $20,000 worth of tools from a general store. "These kids aren't used to being outside of the kind of closed community they lived in, in Colorado City, and some don't adjust well," says Andrea Esquer, spokesperson for the Arizona attorney general. "They might start using meth, they might wind up homeless, they might end up prostituting themselves. They have to find someone who helps them transition, and that puts pressure on social service agencies."

Like immigrants in a strange new land, Crickers find it safer and easier to cluster together than to integrate into the broader community. They desperately want to blend in with Gentiles, as they call anyone outside the FLDS, but they know they're perceived as oddities.

That's why, after a few months of bottomless loneliness in the trailer park, Sam Icke moved into the butt hut. As the oldest teenage resident, he soon became the boys' de facto guardian. A few of them picked up a little construction work, to contribute what they could toward rent -- $10 here, $20 there -- but for the most part, Icke was supporting them all, struggling to make the $700 rent and to keep the refrigerator stocked. There were times when they ran out of food entirely, times where the power was shut off and everyone sat around in the dark with no TV to distract them. "The kids I took in were like little brothers to me," Icke says. "I loved them and I was doing everything I could to help them, but it was like trying to fill up the ocean with a teaspoon." From time to time, Icke contemplated returning to Colorado City to try to redeem himself. When he left, his father had given him some of the prophet's sermons on tape, in hopes that Icke would listen to them and repent. He never did. Instead, he reused them, recording meandering stoned conversations between him and his friends.

About once a week, the local police would raid the butt hut and send the underage kids back to Colorado City, classifying them as runaways. After two and half months of police raids and financial stress, Icke started losing his temper. A lot. "I was acting like a woman with PMS," he says. "I'd get pissed off and nobody could understand why." He couldn't take it anymore, trying to keep afloat his own life and the lives of a dozen kids who were just as shell-shocked and clueless as he was. One day he came home from work and gathered his charges around him in the living room.

"I'm really sorry," he said, "but I'm going to give up the lease on this place, so you're all going to have to find another place to live."

The boys nodded and studied the carpeting. Banished again. Within two weeks they were gone, moved on to other butt huts or, if they were lucky, to the houses of brothers or cousins or uncles who were heretics just like them.

Next page: Once the boys have been outcast, few want to return