Utah murder-suicide underscores frequency of family killings
Eight Dead Utah
Jess, left, sits next to her sister, Cecily, during a press conference regarding the killing of a family in Enoch, Utah on Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023. A Utah man fatally shot his five children, his mother-in-law and his wife, then killed himself two weeks after the woman had filed for divorce, according to authorities and public records.
(Ben B. Braun/The Deseret News via AP)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAM METZ and CLAUDIA LAUER
Fri, January 6, 2023
ENOCH, Utah (AP) — City leaders in a small Utah town choked up this week as they expressed shock after a murder-suicide carried out by a fellow church member left eight people dead in their close-knit community, including five children who were classmates with their kids.
Though shocking, family mass killings are an all-too-common tragedy across the country. They've happened nearly every 3.5 weeks for the last two decades on average, according to a database compiled by USA Today, The Associated Press and Northeastern University.
Enoch, Utah, is one of more than 30 communities sent reeling by a family mass killing in the last two years, a list that includes communities of wealth and poverty and spares no race or class. A family mass killing — where four or more people were killed, not including the perpetrator — happened each of the last two years in places as large as Houston or as small as Casa Grande, Arizona, the database shows.
The circumstances of the killings are myriad: An argument over pandemic stimulus checks leaves four family members shot dead and two injured in Indianapolis; financial issues lead to authorities finding six children and their parents inside a house set ablaze in Oklahoma; an escalating custody battle in Ohio precedes a man and members of his family shooting the mother of his child and seven of her family members; a father loses his job, piles his wife and kids in the family station wagon and plunges it into the Detroit River.
Motives can remain speculative in family killings in which assailants take their own lives, but police often cite financial or relationship issues as the causes.
Enoch police are still investigating what led to the deaths discovered Wednesday, but authorities said Tausha Haight had recently filed a divorce petition against her husband Michael, a 42-year-old insurance agent who they believe killed her, their five children and Tausha’s mother, who was staying at the family’s home.
Officials have not released information on the weapon they believe killed the adults and the children, who ranged in age from 4 to 17. A relative of Tausha Haight said Friday that the family was left “vulnerable” after Michael Haight removed guns he and his wife owned in the days before the murder-suicide.
Police went to the Haight’s home on Wednesday in response to a welfare check call placed when Tausha Haight missed an appointment.
The news left mothers, fathers, teachers and churchgoers asking a question many communities face in the aftermath of mass shootings: How could this happen here?
City Councilman Rob Jensen said he was well aware such tragedies happen throughout the country, yet that did little to quell the shock he felt when the killings happened in his town.
“Especially in a small town, you don’t anticipate this kind of thing. Nobody does,” Jensen said. “Everyone knows this kind of thing can happen. But everyone wants to say that it’s not them.”
Family mass killings immediately capture the attention of people in a community, but rarely garner the level of national attention received by mass killings at schools, places of worship or restaurants, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has studied familicides and mass killings for decades.
Fox, who helped compile and maintains the database for the AP and USA Today, said that’s because it doesn’t carry the same kind of fear with the public. He noted police often issue messages saying there is no danger to the public shortly after the killings are discovered.
“It’s a nice safe community, but family massacres are independent of the crime rate in the local area,” he said. “We are talking about internal factors, and I think that’s why it’s hard for people to see themselves in these situations and why the response is to mourn instead of fear.”
Family mass killings are in fact the most common type of mass killing, making up about 45% of the 415 mass shootings since 2006, according to the database. They happen twice as frequently as mass shootings in which members of the public are killed.
Most, but not all, involve handguns, only about a third involve households with a previous occurrence of domestic violence and most of the assailants have no violent history or criminal past, Fox said.
There is no governmental agency tracking murder-suicides nationally, so a few years ago policy analysts at the Violence Policy Center — a nonprofit educational organization that conducts research and public education on violence in the U.S. — began tracking details from news accounts to produce an annual report. The latest version from 2020 looked at murder-suicides including many mass killings during the first six months of 2019.
The study found 81% of murder-suicides happened at home and 65% involved intimate partners. The study also found that among murder-suicides where more than three people aside from the assailant were killed, six of the 10 during those six months were incidents in which a person killed their children, partner and themselves.
Fox said most of the killings fall into two categories. The first is murder by proxy, in which the killer is motivated by anger or resentment and kills the children who are seen as an extension of their partner. The second is suicide by proxy motivated by despondency or depression, most often a job loss, and the assailant kills the children as an extension of themselves.
"He wants to spare them the misery of living in this awful world," Fox said. “Over the years, there's been an eclipse in community. There was a time decades ago if you had trouble feeding your family or if you had lost your job, neighbors would come over with casseroles and they would offer emotional support. Many people don’t know their neighbors these days.”
___
Lauer reported from Philadelphia.
COMMENT
J.
This is domestic violence. In domestic abuse, the most dangerous time for the woman is when she tells the man she's leaving the marriage, which this woman had - she had filed for divorce the week prior. I'm so sick of these constant news articles of sick 'men' who abuse their wives and family in the first place and second, are so sick that they'd rather kill their entire family than suffer through rejection and divorce.
Utah man massacred family, including five children, after divorce petition
Thu, January 5, 2023
By Daniel Trotta
(Reuters) -A 42-year-old Utah man whose wife had filed for divorce just before Christmas shot dead seven members of his family including his five children ranging in age from 4 to 17 and then turned the gun on himself, officials said on Thursday.
The massacre on Wednesday has stunned the close-knit community of Enoch City in southwestern Utah, where both the mayor and the city manager said they knew the Haight family as neighbors.
After reporting the shooting with scant details on Wednesday, city officials called a news conference on Thursday and identified the shooter as Michael Haight, the father of the five children he killed.
Haight also shot dead his wife, Tausha Haight, 40, and her mother, Gail Earl, 78.
The children killed were a 4-year-old boy, a 7-year-old boy, a 7-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl and a 17-year-old girl, officials said without naming them.
"The Haights were my neighbors. The youngest children played in my yard with my sons," Enoch City Mayor Geoffrey Chesnut told reporters. "Enoch City is a very close community. The neighbors are good. The people are wonderful. And the effort we make on one another's behalf is like family."
The rural town of about 7,500 is home to a high number of young professionals with children, Chesnut said.
Police were sent to the home for a welfare check after Tausha Haight had missed an appointment in town and efforts to reach her had failed, Chesnut said.
Tausha Haight and one of her daughters had been seen at a church event on Tuesday night, Chesnut said.
Officials declined to draw conclusions about the impact of the divorce petition that they said had been filed on Dec. 21.
Police Chief Jackson Ames said officers were once called to the couple's home a couple of years ago for an incident that he declined to describe, but that there had been no recent complaints.
"From what we saw outside, they were just phenomenally kind, and so everyone I've talked to has just been absolutely shocked about losing them," neighbor Garrett Minkler told ABC4 television.
School officials said counselors were being made available to classmates of the victims.
City Manager Rob Dotson noted that officials at the news conference were misty-eyed, their voices cracking, because of the emotional toll.
"We don't know why this happened," Dotson said. "However, we do know that they were our friends. They were our neighbors. And that we loved them."
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Thu, January 5, 2023
By Daniel Trotta
(Reuters) -A 42-year-old Utah man whose wife had filed for divorce just before Christmas shot dead seven members of his family including his five children ranging in age from 4 to 17 and then turned the gun on himself, officials said on Thursday.
The massacre on Wednesday has stunned the close-knit community of Enoch City in southwestern Utah, where both the mayor and the city manager said they knew the Haight family as neighbors.
After reporting the shooting with scant details on Wednesday, city officials called a news conference on Thursday and identified the shooter as Michael Haight, the father of the five children he killed.
Haight also shot dead his wife, Tausha Haight, 40, and her mother, Gail Earl, 78.
The children killed were a 4-year-old boy, a 7-year-old boy, a 7-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl and a 17-year-old girl, officials said without naming them.
"The Haights were my neighbors. The youngest children played in my yard with my sons," Enoch City Mayor Geoffrey Chesnut told reporters. "Enoch City is a very close community. The neighbors are good. The people are wonderful. And the effort we make on one another's behalf is like family."
The rural town of about 7,500 is home to a high number of young professionals with children, Chesnut said.
Police were sent to the home for a welfare check after Tausha Haight had missed an appointment in town and efforts to reach her had failed, Chesnut said.
Tausha Haight and one of her daughters had been seen at a church event on Tuesday night, Chesnut said.
Officials declined to draw conclusions about the impact of the divorce petition that they said had been filed on Dec. 21.
Police Chief Jackson Ames said officers were once called to the couple's home a couple of years ago for an incident that he declined to describe, but that there had been no recent complaints.
"From what we saw outside, they were just phenomenally kind, and so everyone I've talked to has just been absolutely shocked about losing them," neighbor Garrett Minkler told ABC4 television.
School officials said counselors were being made available to classmates of the victims.
City Manager Rob Dotson noted that officials at the news conference were misty-eyed, their voices cracking, because of the emotional toll.
"We don't know why this happened," Dotson said. "However, we do know that they were our friends. They were our neighbors. And that we loved them."
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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