UT - Family of 8 found dead in home by gunshot in Enoch, Jan 2023

[cvaldez1975]

Yes, apologies, I was agreeing with your statement and was just adding that a lot of people hear about how much Mormons value or emphasize family and don't realize how prevalent abuse is within the church body.

im sorry what you went through in the name of religion. thats why i shy away from it. i pray, but i dont go to church.

 

[DFWNF]

anthony todt too

And Chris Coleman. so very sad. Not all 3 at the same time, but Josh Powell too

 

[303gmf]

Amen

Awomen!

 

[sorcoy14]

Utah father took guns from home before killing 7, leaving family 'vulnerable,' relative says

The Utah father who shot and killed his family removed weapons from the home days before the killings, leaving them vulnerable because they were trained in gun safety, a relative says.

www.ksl.com

Southern Utah shooting: 'No one ever thought this would happen'

Friends and family talked about the family of Tausha and Michael Haight and the last time they saw them before police say Michael Haight shot and killed them all before killing himself.

www.ksl.com

 

[airportwoman]

I'm stumbling here. We have 7 people murdered by a family member. Yet 4 young adults murdered by a stranger in Idaho capture our attention to many hundreds of magnitudes in comparison. I'm not saying it shouldn't (I am devastated by those senseless, vicious murders), but we write off domestic violence like it's nothing. I guess that's because we believe that domestic violence can't happen to us if we have 'good lives' yet stranger violence COULD happen to us so it's more random and shocking.

My point is that every life lost to violence matters equally. But we don't treat them as such.
(And don't get me going on indigenous lives!!! or lives of people who live high risk lifestyles!)

Thank you for reading my rant. I just needed to get that out of my system. My apologies.

I'm going to respectfully disagree. In this case, we know who did it, and he's dead. In that other case, for a long time we had no idea who did it, or why, and they (remember, BK hasn't been convicted yet) even left two survivors in the house, uninjured, physically anyway.

 

[airportwoman]

The exact same time Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie were in Moab being questioned by police over a DV incident, a married lesbian couple were shot to death in their tent at a campsite near Moab in broad daylight. As the US subsequently turned itself inside out trying to find Gabby, with breathless coverage all over MSM, this case of two murdered women was largely ignored and received only cursory, very local coverage.

It's blond girl syndrome -- if a victim is young, blond, attractive and female, MSM will fall all over themselves with nation wide coverage. The three young women murdered in Moscow, ID certainly fit this description.

Kudos to police who worked incredibly hard to identify the perps in Moab, UT and Moscow, ID.

I really think the lesbian couple case got less attention because there was pretty good evidence that not only did authorities know who did it, but that he also knew them, at least nominally (both were true) and then he died in the meantime. They were just never able to gather up enough solid information to make an arrest.

 

[airportwoman]

I think this case is not getting as much attention because he killed himself too, there's nobody to pay for this awful tragedy. If he was still alive, I bet this would be much like the Watts case.

It looks like things probably got bad in 2020, Tausha stopped posting that year and it seems like they took pictures as a family in the Summer of 2022. It's clear that something bad happened recently and she couldn't take it anymore so asked for the divorce.

She may have deleted posts, too. Anyway, just because Tausha stopped posting on social media in 2020, that really doesn't mean anything. Some people decide to abandon it, or change platforms, for reasons that are harmless, and nobody else's business.

Some years back, I stumbled onto a board that one of my IRL friends posted on, more than 10,000 posts on a topic I had no idea she was even remotely interested in (and believe me, she had enough information on her profile for ME to identify her!) and I found out in the meantime that she abruptly stopped posting in 2010, except for a single post in 2012, and had last visited the site in 2015. She has no idea that I know any of this, and am going to keep it that way.

 

[airportwoman]

Yes, apologies, I was agreeing with your statement and was just adding that a lot of people hear about how much Mormons value or emphasize family and don't realize how prevalent abuse is within the church body.

Do Mormons have premarital counseling, the way many mainstream Christians, or even secular wedding officiants, do?

And yes, I have definitely heard plenty of stories about officiants refusing to marry a couple for any number of reasons, the most obvious being known abuse, or massive incompatibility.

 

[sorcoy14]

Do Mormons have premarital counseling, the way many mainstream Christians, or even secular wedding officiants, do?

And yes, I have definitely heard plenty of stories about officiants refusing to marry a couple for any number of reasons, the most obvious being known abuse, or massive incompatibility.

To my knowledge, as someone who was not only raised Mormon but was raised Mormon for the majority of time in Utah, no there isn’t. There is a big push to start having families as soon as you can so the marriage process can be super rushed. I know a couple that dated for six weeks before the guy proposed.
The majority of LDS people also tend to not go to therapy unless the therapist is affiliated with the church, which opens up a HUGE problem with ethics. For example my friend was being abused by her husband and the LDS therapist told her that she just needed to put in more effort into being a good wife. They also aren’t super great about giving meaningful advice about mental illness in general, in my experience.

 

[Marysmith]

Divorce is a massive deal for an LDS family. I can only imagine how bad things were in that family for her to get to the point of filing.

We were shunned when my parents separated. I remember, distinctly, one young mother refusing to let me touch her baby, like it was 'catching'. The whole religion is structured around the perfection of the nuclear family, and when it goes wrong... let's just say a lot of judgement gets thrown around.

And, what most people don't realise about Mormons is that they marry for 'time and all eternity'. If someone loses a partner to death, they can remarry, but for a woman, that marriage can't be performed in the Temple and won't be recognised in the afterlife, whereas a man can have as many marriages in the Temple as he likes if he's a widower, and they all count, because polygamy still exists in the mainstream church, just after death.

The only way for a woman to be able to remarry and have it 'count' is to be granted a temple divorce by the church, and this is done rarely. You need a really, really good reason. It's an intrusive, courtlike process. Basically, your husband has to do something worthy of excommunication.

Basically, tl;dr, divorce is a massive deal, and just the loss of face from a civil divorce might be enough to trigger an abusive spouse.

My opinion, and experiences, only, but the Church is pretty open about the central pivot of family, it's why they're obsessed with genealogy, and their Proclamation to the World on the family is easily Googlable.

Thank you for sharing your experience!
I grew up in a highly Mormon town, but am not Mormon myself, and agree that it must have been a really bad situation for her to file for divorce. Clearly it was.

 

[Marysmith]

I'm stumbling here. We have 7 people murdered by a family member. Yet 4 young adults murdered by a stranger in Idaho capture our attention to many hundreds of magnitudes in comparison. I'm not saying it shouldn't (I am devastated by those senseless, vicious murders), but we write off domestic violence like it's nothing. I guess that's because we believe that domestic violence can't happen to us if we have 'good lives' yet stranger violence COULD happen to us so it's more random and shocking.

My point is that every life lost to violence matters equally. But we don't treat them as such.
(And don't get me going on indigenous lives!!! or lives of people who live high risk lifestyles!)

Thank you for reading my rant. I just needed to get that out of my system. My apologies.

Absolutely some cases don’t get the attention they warrant, for many said and sad reasons…
And murder suicides are mentioned and then they’re done as the perpetrator is dead. And I find lots of times it’s still hard for people to believe that the perpetrator could have done it…

 

[Erutan]

Does anyone here think he may also have been abusing the children, and she found out about it?

Hope not !
I'd like to think he spared them that indignity, but if someone can kill, they can certainly commit other crimes.
My guess is that he felt he owned them.
And that poor mother in law.
What did any of them do to to him that merited such a horror ?
Prob. nothing !
Imo.

 

[DFWNF]

I think it's less about caring about one set of victims more than the other, and more that there's no mystery here. If it had come out that this family had been killed by a stranger from the outside, you can bet that this thread would be flying. But there's nothing to sleuth, here. The monster was inside the walls of the home all along. Domestic violence is just as shocking, moreso, in my opinion, because it's someone you love and trust. He should have been cherishing his family, divorce or no, and he did the polar opposite. It's obscene.

I can only speak for myself, but this case actually upsets me more than Moscow, because none of these kids got even a taste of life as an adult like Xana, Ethan, Kaylee, and Maddie did. But there is no trauma olympics. In both cases, a whole lot of folks died unnecessarily. I don't care less because there's less to say, here.

MOO

I agree, for me it's not about caring less at all. Jmo/jme when it is domestic violence or family annihilators, tragically, our broken hearts, and desperately sad people, from it happening over and over and over again, and no way to date that I know of to stop it, and for some of us it seems predictable from cases we follow and stats, it is not as surprising or shocking as stranger murders. . Still just as tragic and horrific and sad. Jmo

 

[Marysmith]

Do we know why he had just lost his job?

 

[Marysmith]

Family of slain Utah family says husband took guns from home

ENOCH, Utah (AP) — A Utah man who fatally shot his five children, mother-in-law and wife and then killed himself removed guns owned by himself and his wife days before the murder-suicide, leaving the family “vulnerable,” a relative said Friday.

www.coastreporter.net

 

[DFWNF]

The exact same time Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie were in Moab being questioned by police over a DV incident, a married lesbian couple were shot to death in their tent at a campsite near Moab in broad daylight. As the US subsequently turned itself inside out trying to find Gabby, with breathless coverage all over MSM, this case of two murdered women was largely ignored and received only cursory, very local coverage.

It's blond girl syndrome -- if a victim is young, blond, attractive and female, MSM will fall all over themselves with nation wide coverage. The three young women murdered in Moscow, ID certainly fit this description.

Kudos to police who worked incredibly hard to identify the perps in Moab, UT and Moscow, ID.

Bbm, I totally disagree. I always think of the song Dirty Laundry by Don Henley. MSM feeds viewers what they know they want to hear about. I don't blame media for that. And fyi I am not, and have never been, in media. Jmo.

 

[airportwoman]

To my knowledge, as someone who was not only raised Mormon but was raised Mormon for the majority of time in Utah, no there isn’t. There is a big push to start having families as soon as you can so the marriage process can be super rushed. I know a couple that dated for six weeks before the guy proposed.
The majority of LDS people also tend to not go to therapy unless the therapist is affiliated with the church, which opens up a HUGE problem with ethics. For example my friend was being abused by her husband and the LDS therapist told her that she just needed to put in more effort into being a good wife. They also aren’t super great about giving meaningful advice about mental illness in general, in my experience.

Oh, heck, I've known lots of couples who became engaged, or even got married, within weeks or even days of meeting. Whether things worked out was widely variable.

With very young couples, especially the women, they may place greater priority on the wedding than they do on the marriage, and that also has little or nothing to do with religious beliefs.

 

[airportwoman]

Thank you for sharing your experience!
I grew up in a highly Mormon town, but am not Mormon myself, and agree that it must have been a really bad situation for her to file for divorce. Clearly it was.

I know a Mormon MAN who filed for divorce, and he said THAT was highly scandalous too. I didn't know him at the time, so I won't say any more about it.

 

[airportwoman]

been there done that... my husbands ex also pulled that one.

i agree w your point, but im talking about those "pillar of the community" types who are monsters behind closed doors. usually ppl post a variety of things but when they only post perfect things it sets my hinky meter off

And usually, it gets out that the Pillar of the Community sexually harassed or otherwise abused subordinates, embezzled money, etc.

 

[libraryg]

Divorce is a massive deal for an LDS family. I can only imagine how bad things were in that family for her to get to the point of filing.

We were shunned when my parents separated. I remember, distinctly, one young mother refusing to let me touch her baby, like it was 'catching'. The whole religion is structured around the perfection of the nuclear family, and when it goes wrong... let's just say a lot of judgement gets thrown around.

And, what most people don't realise about Mormons is that they marry for 'time and all eternity'. If someone loses a partner to death, they can remarry, but for a woman, that marriage can't be performed in the Temple and won't be recognised in the afterlife, whereas a man can have as many marriages in the Temple as he likes if he's a widower, and they all count, because polygamy still exists in the mainstream church, just after death.

The only way for a woman to be able to remarry and have it 'count' is to be granted a temple divorce by the church, and this is done rarely. You need a really, really good reason. It's an intrusive, courtlike process. Basically, your husband has to do something worthy of excommunication.

Basically, tl;dr, divorce is a massive deal, and just the loss of face from a civil divorce might be enough to trigger an abusive spouse.

My opinion, and experiences, only, but the Church is pretty open about the central pivot of family, it's why they're obsessed with genealogy, and their Proclamation to the World on the family is easily Googlable.

I can never think of the LDS and crime without recalling the horrific murder of Janet Abaroa, and her unborn child, by her husband Raven. One of the most heartbreaking cases I have read on WS.