Quilts and blankets are piled at the back of an assembly room where teenage girls were brought for questioning and held overnight.

In one classroom, used as an interview room by investigators, someone has written a message in neat handwriting on a chalkboard: "I want the police to know we are at peace." Someone with less perfect penmanship added: "We was here."

Jessop pauses Sunday in a first-grade classroom and points to a child-size desk with his 7-year-old son's name on it.

"It's a lot of pain," he says moments later. "I'm at a loss for words these past few weeks."

Jessop has seven children now in state custody and, like other FLDS parents, no clear notion of what he needs to do to get them back.

At the YFZ Ranch, owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, most adults were sequestered in their homes, meeting as families for prayer and comfort.

"You won't find a lot of people out working today," Jessop said. "We've got quite a few grieving parents around."

State authorities took 416 children from the ranch after a Child Protective Services investigation found evidence of underage girls who were pregnant or mothers.

A judge agreed Friday to keep them in state custody. The children will be relocated from the San Angelo Coliseum to foster homes and other care settings in coming days.

Mothers who were allowed to stay with children younger than 5 will be separated in the next few days and sent back to the ranch - something they may not be aware of yet, said one anguished FLDS man.

The FLDS have remained calm and composed in public, but the mothers are "feeling the same pain any mother would feel at having their children ripped away from them," said Amy Johnson, 41, who has two daughters in state custody.

"The pain and the torture on my heart is of such a nature I can't even begin to express it in words," she said.

Silent for years, the FLDS are finally defending their lifestyle and religion, which they say has been grossly misrepresented. They are peaceful people who adhere to biblical principles of loving kindness, they say. There is no force in their religion, they say.

"We're angry, we don't understand how this could happen in America, but it's not in our nature or belief to terrorize someone just because they terrorize us," said Johnson, who teaches an eighth-grade girls' class.

They are "competent and capable" mothers, Johnson adds - a point not disputed in general by Texas CPS, who has described the FLDS children as exceptionally healthy, respectful and well-behaved.

But ex-members, child advocates and government officials give a greatly contrasting portrayal of the group, which they say uses coercion, control and abuse to keep members in check and foster a systematic pattern of sexual abuse of young girls through underage marriages.

Texas investigators say they have identified five underage teenagers who are pregnant or mothers.

"They explain they are one big family, one big community, and share one belief system," Texas Child Protective Services investigator Angie Voss said during a hearing last week. "They believe that having children at a young age is a blessing, and therefore a child of any age isn't safe."

Until 2005, Texas allowed girls as young as 14 to marry with parental permission; it was then raised to 16. On Sunday several FLDS women said they they didn't know the law had changed until the raid.

But other FLDS members said this week such marriages have been discouraged in recent years.

"There may be individual cases where something may have happened, but that's different than [having it] hang over the whole religion, over all the people," Johnson said.

Her older daughter, Sarah, is 18, married and has a 5-month-old. She is one of the teens whose age is disputed by Texas authorities. Johnson said her 13-year-old daughter will have to be at least that age before she is allowed to marry.

For now, Johnson's concerns are much more immediate. Getting her youngest daughter back is "consuming me," she said. "I've got to get back to my child."

That desperation is being felt by most of the mothers, Jessop said.

"Our whole religion is a gospel of peace and that is the only thing that keeps these women from having a nervous breakdown once a day," he said. "They're all getting close to the Lord."

As he leads a tour, Jessop said the faith has no doctrine that compels young marriages and he wants his children to be at least 18 before they marry.

Young women, he said, can accept or reject marriage matches. "I've seen it time and time again where a girl is asked if she feels good about this and she said, 'No, I need a few more years,' " he said.

That is not what Elissa Wall told a Utah jury last fall, when she testified that FLDS leaders - specifically Warren S. Jeffs - gave her the option in 2001 of marriage at age 14 or spiritual damnation.

On Sunday, Jessop said there may be a "problem or two or three" but "go down any street in America and tell me you're not going to find a few little problems."

Jessop's children range in age from 3 months to 10 years. He last spoke to his wife a week ago. She told him their 2-year-old keeps asking the same question: "When do we get to go see the chickens?"

He and his family live in a three-story log home. There are 19 such structures, with identical layouts and color schemes: pale blue or teal carpeting, bedrooms, big kitchens for a megasized family.

Beds, tables, desks and chairs are made from oak harvested at the ranch and crafted in the community's woodshop. This orderly place is equipped with gardens, dairy, cheese factory and orchards, designed to make the people self-sufficient.

"It represents a lot of work, but we give all the credit to Heavenly Father," Jessop said. "People who come out of our society, our religion, are good, wholesome and pure. We're the answer to a better world, not the problem."

brooke@sltrib.com