The 21 children who were released from a religious cult’s compound after a deadly shootout have been visible to the world for only a few seconds, usually through the window of a police van as they are whisked away from the place where they huddled through the gun battle.
But in interviews with social workers, former cult members and a 14-year-old boy who lived in the compound until hours before the shootout, a picture is emerging of the children’s life before the bloody events of Feb. 28.
It shows a routine that is by turns harrowing and almost eerily pleasant: Cult leader David Koresh reproaching them for their sins and the sins of the world in lectures that could stretch for hours, or displaying his arsenal of weapons; the group talent shows every few weeks; the little dog houses that the children helped to build for 11 Alaskan malamute puppies.
Despite allegations by former cult members that Koresh sexually abused girls, there is considerable evidence that the children were, in at least some important respects, well cared for. None show any signs of physical abuse, and most seem consumed with a wish to see their parents, who remain barricaded inside the compound surrounded by federal agents.
Seventeen more children are inside, and most of them, unlike the children who have left, are believed to have been fathered by Koresh. A self-declared messiah, he once told his followers that these children were destined to rule at his side in the Kingdom of Heaven.
As for the children who left the compound, reports from social workers suggest that they are a strikingly interdependent group.
“They seem to be very much like brothers and sisters,” said Joyce Sparks, a caseworker for the state’s Child Protective Services agency. “They’re interacting as you might see children of a family interacting.”
The children have described to the social workers a sporadic system of home schooling that sometimes included up to six straight hours of lectures about the Bible by either Koresh or one of their parents. But if the teaching schedule was less regular than what the children would have been exposed to if they had been allowed to go to public school, many seemed perfectly proficient at math, reading, and describing the world around them, social workers say.
Koresh is a figure who inspires a certain fear, since he punished children from time to time by spanking them with a paddle and describing whatever he said were their sins, such as lying, in great detail to their playmates. But partly because he is capable of being extremely affectionate and partly because many parents taught them to revere the leader, many children have spoken fondly of him.
Child Protective Services has resolutely declined to allow reporters direct access to the children. But one 14-year-old boy who lived at the compound and missed the shootout only because he and his father had gone to a gun show last Sunday, characterized Koresh as “a guy who knows a lot about a lot of things” and someone whose word should be followed regardless of what he said.
“If you were punished, he said it was because you had done something wrong and maybe it hurt him to have to do it,” said the boy, Kalani Fatta.
The boy also described many far more pleasing aspects of life inside the compound. In several hours of interviews with him and his father, Paul Fatta, it was clear that both badly wanted to be reunited with their friends and what they repeatedly called their “family.”
The crucial mystery surrounding Koresh’s children is whether he is keeping them in the compound because he believes he is protecting them or he intends to carry out his stated vision of leading them to the afterlife.
“He used to say to us, in essence, `My kids are better than your kids,’ ” said Marc Breault, of Melbourne, Australia, who emerged even before last Sunday’s raid as one of the few former cult members willing to offer warnings about Koresh.
But asked whether he believed Koresh would actually lead himself and his children into death, Breault said he did not know.
At a news briefing here, the state agency said all 21 of the released children were being kept together at an undisclosed location. The agency also said it would probably be several days before courts begin to determine if there were any who should be sent to live with relatives.
The immediate question about the parents is whether they will come out of the compound alive. If they do, there is also a possibility they will be sentenced to years in prison or be found mentally incompetent. In either case, despite the evidence available here that they have provided for their children, a judge may require that the children be sent to live with someone else.
If that happens, Charles Hart Enzer, a child psychiatrist who is chairman of the peer-review committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, said that it would be crucial that they retain positive images of the time they spent in the compound.
“The challenge is to give them reason to be proud of each parent,” said Dr. Enzer. “The worst-case situation is where children are taught to hate the parents, hate their heritage, hate their history, hate themselves and feel guilty and bad for being angry.”
To people on the outside, it might seem that the children would be happy to be out of the confines of the compound and the ultimate control of a madman. But it is just not that simple, authorities here say.
“I don’t know whether I would call it a sense of relief,” said Robert Boyd, executive director of Child Protective Services, the state agency here now in charge of the children. “Most of them are young kids and most of them, their whole life has been living with this same group of people in these same routines. What may seem to be a strange situation to us is not that way to them, because they have nothing to compare it to.”
