Battling Bountiful
A MAN WITH DEEP FAMILY TIES TO THE POLYGAMOUS COMMUNITY LEFT AND NOW WANTS TO SAVE HIS KIDS
Brandon Seth Blackmore is desperate to gain sole custody of his young, impressionable children and wrest them from of the grips of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Since leaving the FLDS and the polygamous community of Bountiful in 2015, Blackmore has tried to find a way to ensure that the church doesn’t turn his children against him while accommodating his ex- wife’s devotion to the church and to prophet Warren Jeffs.
“I never wanted to take them from Maria,” he said in an interview. “I wanted to accommodate them (Maria and the church) to some degree.”
Trying to make it work has cost him thousands of dollars in legal fees.
Over the past three years, his ex- wife has ignored consent orders, contested them and managed to get one overturned.
It’s been frustrating. His youngest child, his daughter, was only eight months old when he left. She’s now six and her brothers are aged eight, 10 and 12. Their futures are on the line since one of the overturned orders required them to attend a public school outside the enclave.
But for now, his biggest fear is that until he has full custody, his children might simply disappear, just as two of his half- sisters did a few years ago.
One disappeared in 2004 when she was 13. Blackmore didn’t see her again until 2010, which is when she told him what had happened to her.
Her parents had taken her from Bountiful to the United States, where she was married to the prophet ( Warren Jeffs) and subsequently raped.
Last November, Blackmore testified for the prosecution and against his father, Brandon James Blackmore, and Emily Ruth Gail Blackmore ( one of his father’s three wives). They were convicted of removing a child from Canada for unlawful purposes. They will be sentenced tomorrow.
Blackmore never finished high school. His uncle and Bountiful’s former bishop, Winston Blackmore, made him leave school to work long hours for a churchowned company for wages that Brandon says worked out to about $1 an hour.
It was only after he left the church that Brandon was able to complete his Grade 12 equivalency in 2013. It means that, finally, at 34, Blackmore is pursuing his lifelong dream to be a police officer. A dual Canadian- American citizen, he starts at the police academy in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, this fall.
It was a June 4 revelation by Warren Jeffs, who is serving a life sentence for sexually abusing two 12-year-old girls, that prompted Blackmore’s final decision to pursue full custody of his chil- dren.
Writing as Jesus Christ from his Texas prison cell, Jeffs proclaimed that 4.7 billion people had been wiped off the face of the Earth during the previous week.
With no access to news and no outside contacts, Blackmore’s ex- wife and others in the FLDS in Bount i f ul aren’ t questioning Jeffs’ assertion that half the world’s population was suddenly “lifted away.”
Instead, it reinforced for them that with The End coming, they too will be disappeared if they’re not good enough to be saved.
Children are t errified because they’re being told they, too, must shoulder the burden of being unworthy along with the adults.
The children can’t have toys or play games. Jeffs outlawed those years ago.
Anything that their father gives them is thrown away — clothes, toys, even candy.
The children’s mother hands both Blackmore’s child support money and the monthly government child-benefit cheques over to the church.
Of course, Blackmore’s learned not to have much faith that others will understand what’s going on in Bountiful.
He was 21 when he was instructed to go to Colorado City, Ariz. He didn’t know why he was called down to the FLDS stronghold. Nor did his father, who got a call as well. But about an hour before his half-sister married the then- 49- year- old Jeffs, Brandon Seth married Rose Maria Johnson. He had never met her before.
Their marriage ended on a Friday night when Blackmore returned from his forestry job. The house that he’d built on church-owned property had been stripped. His wife and four children were gone.
He had been deemed unworthy by the church’s leaders for asking so many questions.
Blackmore went straight to the RCMP and with their help, notified the border patrol to ensure his wife didn’t try to flee with the children.
His first consent order was granted in April 2012 — two- hour visits every weekend, but they couldn’t leave Bountiful. In mid- August, Richard Blackmore — Brandon’s stepbrother and now the FLDS bishop — told him not to come back.
But he’s kept going to court again and again, and kept going back to Bountiful.
Now he just wants it all to end.
If he had his way, all the children in Bountiful would go to a public school.
Black more testified against his father because he wants the marriage of underaged girls to end along with the practice of polygamy. His fiancée, Rachel Jeffs, testified as well. Her father is the prophet.
“That whole way of living is not a good system,” says Blackmore. “It needs to stop.”