BishopAccountability.org
	Fall of a 'Prophet': Swinton: 'A Person of Interest' By Kiah Collier, Michael Kelly San Angelo Standard-Times August 20, 2011 http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2011/aug/20/swinton-a-person-of-interest/ SAN ANGELO, Texas — On Aug. 3, the same day the judge presiding over the Warren Jeffs trial rejected yet another request to throw out evidence from the 2008 raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, Rozita Swinton tweeted: "Can't wait to tell my side of the story! Patience it will be worth it." Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and seven other men from the sect are behind bars, prosecuted almost entirely on the vast quantity of records, audio recordings and other documents collected during the state's weeklong foray on the polygamous sect's isolated 1,700-acre ranch near Eldorado. The raid probably never would have happened if not for a handful of apparently bogus phone calls made to a San Angelo-based domestic violence and child abuse hotline that were eventually linked to Swinton, a Colorado woman with a long history of false reporting in her home state. Swinton, 36, has yet to be prosecuted for the calls and has not divulged her tale. A few days into the raid, which began the night of April 3, 2008, Texas authorities traced more than a dozen calls made to the Newbridge Family Shelter to a Nextel cellphone number linked to Swinton. The calls had come from a soft-spoken, sometimes emotional female who claimed to be a 16-year-old girl living on the ranch with an 8-month-old baby, pregnant again and married to a 49-year-old polygamous man who sexually and physically abused her. The caller, who identified herself as Sarah Barlow, was never found during the raid. By the time Texas Rangers discovered the calls were phony, authorities already had discovered what they deemed evidence of child abuse: numerous pregnant girls on the ranch who were obviously underage. After the raid, the state charged a dozen FLDS men on counts including child sexual assault and bigamy. Since then, the Texas Attorney General's office has continuously identified Swinton as a "person of interest" but has yet to prosecute her. Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for the office, said that is still the case. "It's an ongoing inquiry," said Strickland, who was in San Angelo for part of the Jeffs trial. David Foley, Swinton's longtime attorney, said it is his understanding that Texas authorities aren't interested in prosecuting his client. "Even if she made those calls," he said, it would be "foolish" to punish someone for exposing child sex predators. Foley said that he's sure Swinton didn't make the calls and that he thinks the state would have difficulty proving she did. As for Swinton's Twitter commentary on Jeffs' trial, Foley said, "She's very interested in it." THE SOCIAL MEDIA AGE Swinton declined a comprehensive interview for this story but said via Twitter direct message that she has "been on Twitter since before the raid," and opened a public account — one that is visible to all Internet users — last year. Swinton's profile shows she created the account in September 2010. "I lay low enough to maintain my safety," she wrote, when asked about why she chooses to maintain an online presence. "Other than that, I'm free to continue to be me. I've done nothing wrong to hide from." During a later phone conversation with the Standard-Times, she took issue with the claim that the calls placed were a hoax, saying "just because" they came from a particular person's phone number doesn't mean that person necessarily made them. She declined to elaborate. AT THE HEART Although law enforcement authorities don't deny the calls that sparked the raid were phony, how they handled them remains at the heart of a high-stakes appeal that could result in overturning trial verdicts that sent Jeffs and the other FLDS men to prison for multiyear — or in Jeffs' case, lifelong — prison sentences for having sex with their underage "celestial" or "spiritual" wives. The focus of the FLDS legal saga has now turned to the Texas 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin, where an appeal of the ruling made in the case of FLDS member Michael Emack is under review. A decision is expected any day now. At the time of the raid, FLDS legal counsel claimed — and still do — that the phony nature of the calls was proof that the state's large-scale invasion of their ranch was an illegal search. However, their defense attorneys say that while the hoax calls set everything in motion, their phoniness has never been the crux of their challenge of the search warrant that allowed for the raid, which resulted in the seizure of extensive volumes of evidence and the temporary removal of more than 400 FLDS children. A stable of high-powered defense attorneys have argued the search warrants granted at the time of the raid were unfounded not simply because it was sparked by a hoax — something even the state doesn't deny — but because law enforcement failed to divulge the phony nature of the calls in an affidavit to 51st District Court Judge Barbara Walther, who signed the search warrant and has presided over all the subsequent prosecutions. They argue that if Texas authorities had taken the time to properly investigate the calls, including tracing the blocked numbers from which they came, they would have easily found Swinton, who was still on probation after pleading guilty to a false reporting charge in Colorado in 2007 and was about to be brought in by Colorado authorities again. Gerry Goldstein, a top San Antonio-based criminal defense attorney who filed the original appeal in the Emack case, said: "The issue is not whether she lied; it's whether the officer was reasonable in believing her. "The issue is not whether she's a hoax; yeah, she was hoax, everyone agrees to that. The issue is, 'Did the officer act reasonably at his end?' And that's really the focus," Goldstein said. Some of the evidence the prosecution presented to jurors in the Jeffs trial, including disturbing, sexually explicit audiotapes played for jurors, were not obtained during the raid but during a 2006 Nevada traffic stop when Jeffs, who was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted fugitives list at the time, was arrested. Strickland, the Texas AG's office spokesman, said prosecutors might have used that evidence to back up the search warrant, but that they didn't have it. A STORIED HISTORY Regardless of Swinton's assertion that she did not place the hoax calls, her criminal history in Colorado suggests she has a long and storied history of false reporting. Around the same time the FLDS-related calls were made in spring 2008, a Colorado detective was in the process of getting the final reports together to issue an arrest warrant for Swinton based on a slew of fabricated reports she had made dating back to 2005 alleging sexual and physical abuse. Terry Thrumston, a longtime detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department's crimes against children unit, said Swinton was already on probation for a false reporting charge made in Douglas County, Colo., in 2007 when she was linked to several other false reports made in Colorado and other states. She pleaded guilty in June 2007 to the Douglas County misdemeanor false reporting charge and received a one-year deferred sentence. Thrumston said Swinton had been permanently assigned to her in 2005 "because of repeatedly calling in sexual assaults." She was nearly done with the affidavit for an arrest warrant when Texas Rangers contacted the department to inquire about a Colorado Springs-area cellphone number that had been traced from the blocked calls made to the San Angelo abuse hotline. "I had been working on (the arrest warrant) before that; it just happened that that also happened at the same time," Thrumston said of the inquiry from the Rangers. In the affidavit, Thrumston wrote: "On April 14, 2008, I spoke with Texas Ranger Long and confirmed (the) telephone number ... was in fact a local Colorado Springs telephone number associated with Rozita Swinton. I informed Ranger Long that Rozita Swinton was known to make false reports of sexual abuse to the police and other agencies. The Texas Rangers advised they would be responding to Colorado Springs to conduct further investigation." Asked if the Rangers inquiry was a shock, Thrumston said, "Well, basically, yes." "It was like wow. Unbelievable," she said. "When they said, 'Do you know this person?' and I'm like, I cannot believe ... that she's down in Texas or reaching out to Texas." Thrumston said they never sought to prosecute Swinton for the Texas calls because it was outside her jurisdiction. "That was up to Texas to make that decision on what they wanted to do on that case," she said. A FREE WOMAN Thrumston's arrest warrant and affidavit are dated April 16, 2008. That same day, Texas authorities identified Swinton as "a person of interest" after searching her Colorado apartment. In January 2010, she pleaded guilty to an unrelated false report she made to Colorado Springs authorities in February 2008 in which she pretended to be an abused teenage girl being held in a basement. Sgt. Steve Noblitt, a spokesman for the Colorado Springs Police Department, said she again received a one-year deferred sentence, meaning if she is not charged with any crimes in the next two years, the charge will be dropped. Since then, no charges — in either Colorado or Texas — have been filed against her, and Swinton remains a free woman.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.