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	Colorado Woman May Be Caller Who Sparked Cps Sweep, Officials Say By Robert T. Garrett Dallas Morning News April 19, 2008 http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-call_19tex.ART.State.Edition2.461730e.html AUSTIN Texas Rangers are pursuing the possibility that the pleas of a 16-year-old girl named Sarah, which triggered the massive child protection raid in West Texas, actually came from a Colorado woman with a history of filing false reports, officials said Friday. Rangers accompanied Colorado Springs, Colo., police on Wednesday as they arrested Rozita Swinton, 33, on an unrelated misdemeanor charge of false reporting to authorities there. Ms. Swinton was already serving a one-year deferred judgment after pleading guilty in a 2005 false-reporting case near Denver. Texas authorities view Ms. Swinton "as a 'person of interest' regarding telephone calls placed to a crisis center hotline in San Angelo, Texas, in late March," said a statement issued by Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Tela Mange. Calls from "Sarah," a teenager who said she'd been forced to marry an older man and bear his child, led Texas Child Protective Services officials to remove 416 children from the polygamist compound run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Eldorado two weeks ago. CPS officials have said they assumed, but have not confirmed, that "Sarah" was among the children now in state custody. State officials said they continued Friday to pursue possible criminal charges of child sex abuse on the compound as a judge heard testimony to determine whether the children should remain away from their parents. The issue did not come up during court proceedings. The polygamist parents, who deny all allegations of sexual abuse, have said they didn't believe the allegations from "Sarah" and suggested the phone calls were faked. Stephanie Goodman, chief spokeswoman for all of Texas' social services agencies, said she doesn't know if the calls that prompted CPS' sweep were a hoax. "It doesn't matter," Ms. Goodman said. She said that while the calls "got us to the gates, it's not what caused us to remove the children." "The decision to remove children was based on the findings at the ranch," she said. "That environment represented a significant risk for sexual abuse for all of those children." On Thursday, CPS supervisor Angie Voss testified at a hearing about the Texas child removals that though state workers couldn't find the girl who purportedly called the San Angelo shelter, their description of her as Sarah, 16, sparked seeming recognition during initial interviews with girls at the ranch on April 3 and April 4. Ms. Voss said that after CPS workers described what they knew of the original caller, some girls at the ranch said they knew of the girl and had seen her in the previous week. Former state District Judge Scott McCown, who handled hundreds of CPS cases while on the bench in Travis County and now heads the Center for Public Policy Priorities, agreed that, legally, it probably doesn't matter whether "Sarah" is a fiction. He said it's not the same as a drug case being thrown out, for example, because a police officer conducted an illegal search, the so-called poison tree analogy. "First, in a criminal case, if you act in good faith upon information that you don't have any reason to know it's false, then it might not be the fruit of the poison tree," Mr. McCown said. "If you go get a search warrant and you got it in good faith and there was no misconduct by the state, but somebody hoodwinked you, what you found in the search warrant doesn't necessarily get excluded." When it comes to the civil case involving the protection of children, "it probably doesn't matter ... because the whole question is the ongoing protection of the children," Mr. McCown said. In Colorado Springs, a search of Ms. Swinton's home yielded "several items" that might link her to calls made about polygamist compounds in Eldorado and Arizona, the DPS statement said. The items, which weren't described, have been shipped to crime labs for analysis. The Rangers won an order by a Colorado judge sealing an affidavit for the search warrant used at Ms. Swinton's residence. The Denver Post reported Friday that an anti-polygamy activist told Texas Rangers that Ms. Swinton was impersonating a child sexual abuse victim at the polygamist compounds and could be the same person who triggered the Texas raid. Flora Jessop, an Arizona woman who grew up in the sect and now helps teen girls trying to escape it, said she had grown suspicious of a caller who turned out to be Ms. Swinton. Ms. Jessop told the newspaper that on March 30 a day after the first call to the San Angelo shelter she received her initial call, also from someone identifying herself as "Sarah," a sexual abuse victim of her new father. The caller later posed as Sarah's twin sister, said Ms. Jessop, executive director of the Phoenix-based Child Protection Project. Ms. Jessop said she recorded 30 to 40 hours of daily phone calls with the woman who turned out to be Ms. Swinton, and shared the tapes with Texas Rangers. The newspaper said Rangers traced the calls to Ms. Swinton's phone. The woman's arrest this week was for allegedly posing in February as a young girl being held in a basement. In 2005, Ms. Swinton pleaded guilty to falsely reporting to police in the Denver suburb of Castle Rock that she was suicidal and wanted to give up a newborn child, the Post said. Authorities later said they could find no child.
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