FLDS experts Sam Brower and Tonia Tewell spent Friday and Saturday, May 17-18, helping to educate concerned Cook County citizens about the FLDS church, which has been known to exploit child labor laws and believes in polygamy and marriage to child brides. Staff photo/Brian Larsen
Tonia Tewell traveled a long way from her home in Draper, Utah to tell folks to be loving and tolerant but watchful of the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).
Tewell and author/detective Sam Brower were both brought to Cook County by a group of concerned citizens to talk about their encounters and knowledge about the FLDS church, an off-shoot of the Mormon church which split in the 1890s after the mainstream church outlawed polygamy and marriage to child brides.
Last Friday night they presented a movie based on an adaption of Sam’s 2011 book Prophet’s Prey. The movie documents his seven-year search for Warren Jeffs, the president and prophet of the FLDS church who is now spending life plus 20 years in a Texas prison for raping a 12-year-old and a 13-year-old girl.
Saturday morning, Tewell and Brower took questions from concerned citizens who wanted to learn more about the FLDS church and Seth Jeffs, the brother of Warren Jeffs, who last December purchased 40 acres on the Pike Lake Road and then secured a building permit for a 5,760-foot pole barn complete with living quarters and a septic system.
Seth, like his incarcerated brothers Warren and Lyle, has not escaped the watchful eye of the law. In fact, Brower was carrying a warrant with him hoping to run into him.
“Sam is hoping to catch him, but Seth will run. He knows Sam is in the county and he’s terrified of him,” Tewell said.
Seth is considered by some to be one of the leaders in the church following his brother’s conviction. But due to the secrecy of the church, no one knows for sure.
Cook County Sheriff Pat Eliasen also spoke on Saturday. Eliasen said he and his deputies were aware of the FLDS church, and would be on the lookout for things like child sex trafficking, which the church has been known to engage in, but until or if they step over the line, the FLDS members have the same rights as everyone else and should be treated that way.
Coming from a banking background before she became a stay-at-home mom for 10 years, Tewell sort of fell into her role as the founder of the nonprofit organization Holding Out Help.
“In 2007 I was at church when I was approached about helping a family who had left the FLDS church. I had a basement with a kitchenette in it, and these ladies didn’t have anywhere to go, so my husband and I decided to take them in.”
Since that time, Tewell and her organization have helped hundreds of people escape from the church by finding them food, shelter, clothing, legal assistance, schooling, jobs, counseling etc.
“When they escape or get kicked out they come out with just the clothes on their back. They don’t own anything. They don’t even have birth certificates or Social Security cards. They are like refugees coming to America. They come to us with nothing.”
Holding out Help has four paid employees and “hundreds of volunteers,” said Tewell.
“Your first response should be to learn to love these people. But if you see any criminal activity, photograph it, record it, write it down and contact the authorities. If you see a child wandering around, the child will respond better to women, we have found. He or she may have gotten kicked out of the church, shunned, and sent away from their families. They need to be helped but might run if you approach them too fast.”
As for Sam, he has been pursuing FLDS leaders for the last 15 years and helped gain convictions for FLDS men who were found guilty of sexually abusing children.
When asked who hires him, Brower responded, “My clients are people who have escaped the church. I have had a lot of them; unfortunately, they don’t have any money,” he said with a smile.
Instead, Brower earns a living from clients who can pay, and he has worked cases that involve “Pretty much any type of crime you can think of,” that can span the entire country.
Before he became detective Sam was a general contractor, “And a pretty successful one,” he said. But Sam had earned undergraduate degrees from Southern Utah University in criminal justice and criminalistics with a minor in chemistry, and the pull became too great to get back into a line of work that he had trained for.
Throughout his career Sam said he has worked with police, the FBI, attorneys general, the United States Department of Justice, the Department of Labor and local government and national public officials. Like Tewell, Sam, who is Mormon, has a great deal of sympathy and love for the victims of the FLDS church, but no sympathy for the sexual abusers of children.
If you have more questions, call Tonia Tewell, 801-386-1077
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