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Originally Posted by article
There were 13 teenagers sleeping on the floor of Sam Icke’s cramped flat on any given day. To get to work in the morning, he had to pick his way over their limp bodies and piles of clothes. The smell of dirty socks and stale beer clung to the matted carpet and ratty brown sofa. Nine hours later, when he got home, Icke would find those same bodies watching a high-speed car chase on the TV, getting stoned and doing shots of Bacardi. In the kitchen, cockroaches feasted on the remains of a pasta dinner.
It was 2003, and Icke was 19 years old. He was the only one in the run-down flat with a steady job, tiling floors for $300 a week in the desert town of Hurricane, Utah. Every week or two, another lad showed up at the door, desperate for somewhere to stay. Icke took them in – no exceptions, no questions asked. He understood what they were going through. Like him and hundreds of others, they had been banished from their homes and forbidden from seeing their families by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a radical offshoot of the Mormon church. Their families wept and protested under their breath, but none of them fought to keep their sons. They didn’t dare defy the orders of their leader, a self-proclaimed prophet whose followers believe him to be the earthly executor of God’s will.
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God moves in mysterious ways, however: on August 28, Warren Jeffs was arrested after two years on the lam. He was charged with two counts of rape as an accomplice, by the state of Utah, and the state of Arizona plans to press similar charges. He had fled the FLDS stronghold of Colorado City, Arizona, in August 2004 after being indicted for arranging the marriage of an underage girl to an older man – one of many hundreds of such ceremonies he is believed to have organised and performed over the years.
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10-22-2006, 12:35 PM
Cast out in shame
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