YFZ Revisited - April 5, 2008 Temple Breached
November 15, 2008 | 1 Comment
We are at the police roadblock on county road 300. It’s late afternoon. They still won’t let us anywhere near the ranch. We are miles from even the gate, let alone the action. Before there had been just two troopers manning this roadblock. Now there are more. And they are multiplying. Every minute it seems another patrol car pulls up and parks. The officers get out and start chatting, telling jokes, and whatever else men do.
Why the build-up, I wonder. Someone says it’s just a shift change. I won’t pay it much attention then.
An ambulance goes up toward the YFZ Ranch, still sealed off with a large police presence searching the place. Now a fire engine goes up, too. I’m not paying any of this much attention, snapping a frame or two just in case. But then I overhear a voice on the police radio that says something like, “You’re going to enter the temple?” Next a bunch of the troopers get in their cars and speed up the road toward the ranch.
I shoot the frame above just as it’s almost too late to show the line of cars going up the road. Only later will I realize that this build-up of force wasn’t a shift change. It was part of the operation to breach the FLDS temple.
We go back up to the parking lot by the Catholic Church, which is the best vantage point for the temple. And the photo above makes it look a lot closer than it is. That photo was only possible with a super telephoto 600mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter on it. For the photo-geeks, the total millimeters of lens for this shot (including 1.3 sensor crop): 1,092mm. Crazy. That temple is miles away.
Now a helicopter starts buzzing around. The sun is down and the light is disappearing.
We’re hearing that the helicopter is for any emergency medical transport that might be necessary in the stand-off over the search of the temple. A local reporter hints that the temple might be rigged with explosives that will be set off once the police go in. We will find out later that instead of preparing for a murderous martyrdom, the FLDS men are ringing the temple singing hymns and crying as the first fundamentalist mormon temple is, in their view, destroyed.
Now it is black out and the helicopter is still buzzing around. We hear it and see its flashing red lights. The temple is lit up, a brilliant white edifice way out in the black night. After tonight the temple will not be lit. Not after the police climb the walls and breach the doors. Not after outsiders enter the sect’s holiest building and search it for signs of child abuse. From now on the temple will now remain dark at night. The light has been extinguished.
YFZ Revisited - April 5, 2008 Eldorado
November 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This photo of FLDS women and children playing on the playground behind the First Baptist Church in Eldorado looks somewhat plain today, but it was a coup on April 5th. It was our second exclusive catch in as many days. We knew they were back there and circled the block spotting all the police cruisers. I thought Brooke was going to circle the block for the photo so I was surprised when she pulled to a stop. I fired seven frames in under a second with a 300mm before the police bore down on us in quick fashion.
The officer who stopped us had a loose tongue. He told us that someone had stopped a vehicle driven by Warren Jeffs, Jr., earlier in the day. Everywhere we went for the rest of the day, we looked for a vehicle matching the description the cop gave us.
Later we met Jimmy and Katdaddy, two real Texas characters. My caption from that day reads, Katdaddy says he’s glad that Texas Child Protective Services has removed children from the FLDS YFZ “Yearning for Zion” Ranch just outside of town, after allegations of child abuse.
YFZ Revisited - April 5, 2008 Press Conference
November 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Just so you get the idea of what it looked like, this is the first CPS press conference. It was held at the Eldorado High School and helmed by CPS spokesperson Marleigh Meisner. At this point the media on-site was a very small group. Meisner told us that 183 people had been removed from the YFZ Ranch, 137 of them children. I remember that seemed like a big number, though it would soon be eclipsed.
Sweet Hotel Room!
November 13, 2008 | 2 Comments
Yeah, my job is just as glamorous as you’d think: the adventure, the travel, the expensed meals. In fact, I’m on an out of town trip right now. And just outside the door to my hotel room is a nine hole golf course. Can’t wait to finish up the assignment tomorrow and hit the links!
Check it:
YFZ Revisited - April 5, 2008 - Bus to Civic Center
November 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I’m finally making progress editing my photographs from the April raid on the FLDS YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, Texas. Looking through the photos for the first time since I shot them, I’m noticing things that I hadn’t before. I’ll post more of those kinds of things later. This post is all about scrambling, trying to find something worthwhile and coming up short.
We rise early and head to a roadblock manned by Texas troopers. After I photograph the roadblock I start photographing other things that catch my eye: an old mattress, a sun-bleached skull, and a kid stuck trying to get through a fence. Omens? Signs of what’s going on? Or just the way this part of Texas looks?
We wait five hours for something to happen and finally a bus comes out from the ranch. I shoot photos of the bus, and there’s at least one FLDS woman/girl on board.
We, along with several other media vehicles, follow the police-escorted bus to the local civic center, one of the temporary shelters set up by CPS. The civic center is the more secure location, barricaded off from traffic. We all park across the highway from the civic center and photograph the scene.
CPS workers line up in what I’m guessing was an attempt to shield any FLDS from our cameras. I’m shooting with a 600mm lens and a 1.4 teleconverter, right through some kind of fence. The shot is horrible but so far it’s all we’ve got for today so we are all trying to get something out of it.
We see a pair of young FLDS women, at least one with a baby. The girl in the pink dress is loaded into the white car and driven off. For the rest of the photos, click through this gallery:
