Lessons From Waco: What Happens to Kids?
Expert on cults compares Waco sect survivors and future for FLDS kids.
April 18, 2008 — -- Fifteen years ago this week, the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, went up in flames, ending a tense 51-day standoff between the religious cult and the FBI.
David Koresh, the group's charismatic leader, and 70 others, including 20 children, died in the inferno.
There are some obvious parallels between the polygamist Branch Davidians and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints members whose Texas compound was recently raided by government officials.
Both sought refuge in remote parts of Texas, about 200 miles apart. Both involved polygamy and accusations of child brides. And both sects have children who will have to contend with the trauma of having the only way of life they've ever known invaded and upended.
Rick Ross, an expert on cults who has worked with former Branch Davidians and Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints members, said that children who come out of closed-off societies or cultlike groups face many of the same problems. But he says the current case in Texas and the fate of the FLDS children poses unprecedented and complex problems.
"I've worked with a number of children removed by the courts from cults, and I've never seen a case like this," Ross told "Good Morning America."
"These children have no support system on the outside. Everyone they know, they love, everything is tied up in that and that group. The Texas authorities have a tough road ahead," he said.
Sky Okimoto was nearly 4 when his mother, Koresh's sixth wife, left the Waco compound. Today he is a 19-year-old college student and still struggling with the confusion and sadness, and the fading memories of Waco.
"Being the son of David Koresh, yes it was pretty hard," Sky told "GMA." "I felt like something was wrong with me because so many people hated my father."
He continued, "I was angry when I was young because I had just lost my father. It was only until the eighth grade really when I decided to be a happy person again."
The Waco Branch Davidians, a splinter group of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, believed they were living in apocalyptic times. Their lifestyle was extremely austere, based on strict discipline, physical labor and intense Bible study.
Koresh, the group's self-proclaimed messiah, took multiple wives with whom he had at least 14 children. Koresh was also accused of abusing underage girls -- one of his wives was 14 years old and another was 12.
After beginning to question Koresh's doctrine, Okimoto's mom, Dana, left the group just months before the standoff with the government.
Still, she said watching her former home go up in flames was horrifying.
"That was probably the worst day of my life, because those were my friends, those were my family," she said in an ABC News "Primetime" interview in 2003. "What made it even harder for me was knowing I would have been in there."
Dana Okimoto told "GMA" that she has avoided watching TV coverage of the FLDS case because of the similarities she sees between the two groups and the emotions it brings back.
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