A federal onslaught on an accused food stamp fraud scheme by polygamous sect on the Arizona-Utah border will allegedly give off details. It is offering to give details about a secretive compound in far south-western South Dakota that has served as one of the church's lands of sanctuary.
According to ABC NEWS, the main leaders from Warren Jeff's Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Chirst of Latter Day Saints, including his brother Lyle Jeffs of Utah and Seth Jeffs of South Dakota were hunted down on Tuesday. Prosecutors alleged church leaders of organizing a fraud scheme instructing members of using food stamp benefits illegally while avoiding to get caught, according to an accusation from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Utah.
However, the court documents noted that the sect members living in the South Dakota compound were banned from using food stamps while living there. This is said to be a potential part of the church leadership's efforts to keep secret their property near Pringle, population 111. The group, recognized to the faithful as "R23" started operating on the compound more than a decade ago.
Business Insider reported that Warren Jeffs is serving a life sentence in Texas for attacking two of his child brides. The authorities claimed that his brother is the bishop of the church's South Dakota worshipers. Seth Jeffs previously downplayed his church responsibilities in dealing with the South Dakota water regulators. He is currently detained in South Dakota, pending a Monday hearing in the food stamp case.
The sect in 2011 reportedly wanted to create a temple on the South Dakota property, but the leaders suggested to the Custer County planning commission that the structure was going to be utilized as a storage building. But the project was wiped out since the leaders got bankrupted.
Warren Jeffs told Jerold Williams, which is a former church elder who supervised the early construction of the South Dakota compound until 2006, that the sites such as South Dakota played an important part in the arrests since the government wanted to seize property on the Arizona-Utah border. "It was a prophesy kind of thing," Williams stated via Yahoo! News. He added, "He was going to do these 'lands of refuge,' he called them, for people to have somewhere to go to."
For now, the neighbours of the property viewed the Pringle outpost with mistrust and concern, including scepticism about Seth Jeffs' truthfulness during a hearing on a request to extract water more quickly at the compound. Although some of the details of the sect were already revealed, some of the details of the court documents remained to be top secret.
