HILDALE, Utah—Two smashed cars covered in mud and a few bunches of wildflowers arranged nearby mark the few visual reminders that nine children and three women died when flash flooding ripped through this small polygamous town on the Utah-Arizona border.
Small makeshift memorials have only started emerging. There are no public plans for a memorial service, and few outward signs of grief.
There is just red mud on roadways and a strange, quiet divide in a community that holds non-believers at arm’s length.
The deaths briefly united followers and defectors of jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs as they scrambled to find survivors from the Monday flood. But the animosity soon returned.
“Though there seemed to be some mingling, the lines of segregation were pretty obvious,” said Dowayne Barlow, who left the church three years ago but recently returned to Hildale, Utah, a town ruled by the sect.
In this secretive religious group run by Jeffs, funerals are handled discreetly. If you’re not a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS, you’re not welcome.
The majority of the 7,700 residents in the sister towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, belong to the sect. Hundreds of others have ties to FLDS members, though they are no longer followers.
Members are regularly ostracized for transgressions. Some of them, usually young men, repent and may return. Others are barred for life. Many have left on their own, deciding not to follow the strict rules or a leader serving a life term in Texas for sexually assaulting underage girls he considered brides.
Hildale Mayor Philip Barlow, an FLDS member and Dowayne Barlow’s cousin, has demurred when asked about memorials, saying the community was allowing the families to mourn. He emphasized the desire for privacy, displayed in the little information released about the victims or the three young survivors.
But Dowayne Barlow and other former members hope more is done to honor the victims. They started by hanging drawings and messages of sympathy done by schoolchildren at a town park Thursday. They are hoping to organize a public memorial next week.
“We don’t want this to be an unnoticed event,” Barlow said.
Non-fundamentalists also held a modest candlelight vigil Wednesday that no sect members appeared to attend. Until then, the desperate search was the only way for some people, including Willie Jessop, to honor their loved ones.
“The only way we can show it, is to find ‘em,” he said.
Jessop, a former FLDS spokesman and Jeffs bodyguard who left the sect in 2011, said two of the women who died — Josephine and Naomi Jessop — are his cousins. He described them as devout, energetic women with a rare spark.
“They were people that had an uncanny ability to be very happy” despite trying circumstances, he said.
The sect is a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism whose members believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven. Polygamy is a legacy of the early teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the mainstream faith prohibits it today.
The sect has a deep-seeded loathing of government and outsiders, a belief that stems from government raids in Hildale in 1953 and at a sect compound in Eldorado, Texas, in 2008. Hundreds of children were taken from their families by authorities enforcing bigamy laws and, in Texas, allegations of child sexual abuse.
