How Safe is Polygamy for Children?

Click to see a nine page, alphabetical list of every body, infant through adult, currently buried in Colorado City, Arizona, home of the FLDS, through 2004. Flora Jessop compiled this list, in her continuing quest to have the children’s deaths of Colorado City investigated.

Highlighted in yellow are the bodies of infants and children, with the age and purported cause of death of each child. 

Like the CDC, I counted anyone 19 years of age or younger as a child.

After doing so, it was clear that Colorado City, Arizona was a tiny city, with a consistent yearly death rate of 50% children or more, almost every year.

Accidental Child Deaths

The AAAP has questions about the unusual numbers accidental deaths, especially among FLDS toddlers reported to have been “accidentally run over”. We can find no other city in America, of the same size [less than 6,000 residents], which has reported almost a dozen children “accidentally run over by cars” in the last 20 years. The AAAP stands on our challenge for anyone to show us the same death results for another modern American city of the same size.

PHOTOS OF CEMETERY

Pam Black, a former member of the FLDS says that not all of Colorado City’s dead infants are buried in the cemetery. While she was still a member of the FLDS, Warren Jeffs declared, “Babies, born stillborn, are born ‘without souls’ and do not require burial in consecrated ground.” When Pam Black gave birth to a stillborn infant in the FLDS run clinic, they wanted to bury her dead baby boy, wrapped in the afterbirth and shoved into a plastic trash bag, in the back yard of the clinic, like a dog. Only after much crying and begging did staff finally relent and allow her child to burial in the “Babyland” cemetery.

No efforts appear made to ad permanent markers to the infant graves in Colorado City. Many graves, the little tin markers from the funeral home having worn out, are now completely unmarked. When asked, the State of Arizona explained that there is no law in Arizona requiring any human grave to be, or to remain marked. How convenient!

Mound after tiny mound rises from the stark landscape of Colorado City, Arizona’s “Babyland Cemetery”, reserved for infant burials.

k.Dee’s Initial Investigation

After my arrival in Mohave County to work as a reporter, a contact gave me a copy of a spreadsheet, obtained from child advocate and anti-polygamy activist, Flora Jessop. It was a list of every single body buried in the Colorado City Cemetery. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to be looking for when she handed it to me, asking me promise to keep it confidential. When I had Flora on the phone, I asked her about it and she said, “I compiled a complete list of the cemetery because of all the dead children up there. The FLDS cemetery is over fifty percent children.”

I was confused. I said, “What do you mean fifty percent children? There aren’t cemeteries made up of fifty percent children anywhere in this country. That’s only something seen in third world countries without proper medical care. When people go to a cemetery they tend to notice the graves of children because they stand out as unusual. That would be bizarre!” Flora said, “Oh yes there is, right up in Colorado City. I’ve got it documented on paper, by photo and we even have a video record we shot. Some of the graves are completely unmarked and some of them even look like they’ve been disturbed. I’ve turned the information over to the state of Arizona, the FBI, the Justice Department, everyone I can think of and nobody gives a damn about it. Nobody will investigate it. It’s an embarrassment for the county and the state and they aren’t about to go out of their way to let the rest of the country know what’s really been going on up here for a hundred years.”

I sat there with the spreadsheet in front of me, headphones on, slurping coffee and watching the voice modulation waves of my digital recording go flat as a silence between Flora and me hung visibly in the air. I almost didn’t want to know any more and I was starting to rub the back of my neck an awful lot. It seemed like every single time I looked at the case things were getting not only worse but weirder, too.

What I did know was that I had to find out if Flora was right about her research. I was wracking my brain one day when I finally thought to check with the Arizona Department of Health. They were so kind as to point me to the state managed website, where I could look up vital statistics to my hearts content. Once I was in there, I quickly discovered I could actually look at deaths, by year, age, and community, all over the state of Arizona. I’d found a way to verify if Flora’s spreadsheet was a hysterical fairytale, concocted by an emotionally out of control advocate, or genuine piece of smart detective work.

I spent half the night in the studio crunching the numbers I was pulling off the state’s own published public records, and it didn’t look good for the crowd claiming nothing was wrong up in Colorado City. Somebody was living in Fairytale land for sure, but it wasn’t Flora Jessop. With numbers pulled straight from the state’s own health department site, it was looking more and more like the State of Arizona was the one drinking the Kool-Aid.

I concentrated on researching Colorado City’s death statistics between 1996 and 2001, when the law started snooping around up there again because of public pressure.

Tiny little Colorado City’s total annual death rate, during those years, was never comprised of less than fifty percent children. The same death statistics for Lake Havasu City, during the same period, a city that had ten times the population of Colorado City, showed a completely normal 2% or less child death rate every year.

There were less than 600 total deaths in Havasu in an average year. I an average year there were less than 10 child deaths in Lake Havasu City, which translated to an almost miniscule [and completely normal] percentage of the total death rate.

First I contacted a source at the Arizona state health department. The person was very nice but obviously completely freaked out by my questions. He admitted, only off the record, because he refused the option of a recorded interview, that the numbers I was giving him indicated something strange was happening in Colorado City.  He finally asked me to contact the county, “since they should know more than we do about the city.” Therefore, I contacted the Mohave County Department of Public Health over in Kingman, the county’s seat.

When I contacted the Health Director there, Patty Mead, she went days without returning my calls. Then, when she finally did return the calls, she sounded almost instantly, incredibly nervous and defensive when I started asking about Colorado City. I even remember at one point taking a deep breath and telling myself that I needed to consciously speak in non-threatening tones and make sure I was truly willing to listen to whatever reaction or explanation she might provide. I needed to be open, as a reporter, to her side.

The problem was that I couldn’t really figure out what her side was. I gave her the numbers and asked her if she thought it might be a good idea to analyze what I had found, to see if there might be any reasonable and simple explanation for it.

She started moving towards the argument that I should really be calling the state about this. She talked about how hard the county had been working all these years to get the men of Colorado City to let their women bring the children in regularly for immunizations, and how nobody wanted to stir anything up that might discourage the FLDS from immunizing their children. By the time I got off the phone I felt more like she was attempting to discourage my investigation than anything else.

So back to the state I went, only this time my contact at Arizona’s health department was downright freakish. When I asked if perhaps someone up there in Phoenix should be looking into these numbers, he claimed that the town of Colorado City was so small that any sample was statistically too insignificant to properly study or warrant any investigation. I’ll admit I was starting to feel a little irritated by then. So I said, “So you’re telling me that if at least one child died in Colorado City every year, from brain tumors or liver cancer, or rabies or food poisoning, the state would consider it too statistically insignificant to draw any attention?”

He was frustrated with me at that juncture and began talking about how they weren’t all dying of the same thing, so we couldn’t compare the two. I knew I had him then.

I said, “How do you know they aren’t all dying of the same thing? Has the state investigated it?” He said, “No”, and I said, “Well, I have a list here of all the dead children buried in the town and their causes of death. You wouldn’t believe how accident prone the FLDS children seem to be. Do you think that they are just a bunch of very unlucky kids up there in Colorado City? Is it that sort of statistical insignificance?” I got a long pause out of him after that, and then he wanted to know if I knew what kind of accidents the children were having.

I replied, “Oh, it looks like they die in all kinds of ways, accidentally drinking poison, drowning, falling off of mountains, and out of highchairs or homemade Ferris wheels, and being attacked by dogs to name a few. But what really catches my attention here, is that I’ve got at least nine dead children listed as having been accidentally run over by a motor vehicle in the last twenty years in the streets and driveways of Colorado City. It’s a town with less than six thousand residents, sir. The one I’m living in right now has almost fifty thousand people in it, and the police can’t think of more than three children having been accidentally run over by a car here during the past twenty years. Does the state keep the autopsies on file?” 

He told me that the state considered being hit or run over by a car, a traffic accident, and so no autopsy was required for a death like that. Bless his heart, the guy simply sounded desperate to get me to leave him alone by that time. It was patently obvious that my source at the state was doing everything possible to get me to leave the issue of the dead children of Colorado City alone.

But he did nervously admit one more thing when he finally asked me, “What is the conviction rate on domestic violence there?” I said, “Thanks for the chat, Sugar”, and hung up.

Next, I called the Mohave County Attorney’s Office asking to speak to Matt Smith, the duly elected county attorney, supposedly there to aggressively prosecute crime for the people of Mohave County.

When he returned my call the next day, he was a pleasure to speak with. I started off by asking him for any comment he had about the eight men from Colorado City, who had recently been indicted in Mohave County on sex charges involving minor female children. Matt talked about how difficult it had been to investigate the cases, since none of the crimes were ever reported by the victims. He explained that what they had finally done was hire a special investigator, by the name of Gary Engels, to go live up there in Colorado City, since he said the county had virtually no real presence in the city beyond a branch of the community college.

I supposed the county health department’s impressive child immunization program must have slipped his mind for the moment. Matt described Gary as a retired veteran of the Bullhead City Police Department, who had been shot by a perpetrator once, three times in the line of duty. I couldn’t help but be impressed by that bit of information.

Matt said they had Gary go through the Colorado City birth certificate records and do some very simple math. For instance if Sally is twenty-two, but she has four children and the oldest of them is now six years old, someone was obviously engaging in sexual activity with Sally, before the legal age in Arizona, which is eighteen years old. Then he simply looked for the name of the child’s father and his date of birth, to see how much older the man was than Sally when he started having sexual relations with her. Sally is twenty-two, with four children, the oldest of whom is six. So obviously the creep was having sex with her, starting when she was no older than sixteen. You don’t need a willing witness to prosecute that case. Simple math, public record and the rule of law proves the case for you.

I thought it sounded like good prosecution plan, since eight men had just been indicted using the tactic. I turned the conversation around a little at that juncture and said, “Well, Matt, how about domestic violence up there in Colorado City. How much of a problem is it?” He went on to describe how he was sure there was domestic violence in Colorado City, just like there was in every city. The problem, he explained was that it obviously had gone unreported. I started getting a creepy feeling at that point and said, “Well how many cases of domestic violence have you prosecuted there, Matt? There was a long pause before he said. “Well, now that you mention it K. Dee, in all the years I’ve been here I’ve never prosecuted a case of domestic violence from Colorado City.”

I asked him, “And how many years have you been there?” He said he’d been behind the desk for ten years, and I was stunned again. I said, “So let me see if I get this right, Matt. You’ve got an entire community where there are sometimes three or four, or seven or ten women, and they’re all living in the one house, with dozens of children, while they’re all sharing one man, and never, not once in the last ten years, within this six thousand person community, living like this, has anyone ever lost their cool and perpetrated any domestic violence. Is that right? Do you really believe that, Mr. Smith?” He didn’t believe any such thing, of course, but he went back to the problem of no victims ever reporting anything.

After our call, I sat there and thought about that. How true could that be? There were plenty of former FLDS women coming forward to tell their stories now. They were out shooting independent documentaries about their ordeals, and filming specials on ABC with John Quinones. How could there have never been a single report or prosecution for domestic violence in Colorado City all these years?

Download the

Child Deaths by Vehicle Chart