A Utah man fatally shot his five children (three girls and two boys, from 4 to 17 years), his mother-in-law (78) and his wife and then killed himself two weeks after the woman had filed for divorce, according to authorities and public records.
Police also revealed during a Thursday news conference that officers investigated the 42-year-old man and his family a “couple of years prior,” suggesting possible earlier problems inside the household. Enoch Police Chief Jackson Ames did not elaborate.
Investigators know about the divorce petition but not say if it was the motivation behind the killings, Mayor Geoffrey Chesnut said.
The killings rocked the small farming town of Enoch in southern Utah about halfway between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. It’s in one of the fastest-growing areas of the country, and communities of new homes are made up primarily of large families that belong, like most in Utah, to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known widely as the Mormon church.
The deceased were well known in town,
“This is a tremendous blow to many families who have spent many nights with these individuals who are now gone,” Chesnut said.
City Manager Rob Dotson said the community was “feeling loss, they’re feeling pain and they have a lot of questions.”
Court records show that Tausha Haight, 40, filed for divorce Dec. 21. Her lawyer said Thursday that Haight had been served with the papers Dec. 27. The reasons for the divorce were unknown, in part because Utah law keeps details of divorce proceedings sealed from the public.
Tausha Haight and other members of the family were seen the night before the killings at a church group for young women, Chesnut said. Police were dispatched to the family’s home Wednesday afternoon for a welfare check after someone reported that she had missed an appointment earlier in the week, city officials said.
James Park, who represented Tausha Haight in the divorce case, said she had not expressed any fear that her husband would physically hurt her. Park declined to elaborate, citing the investigation into the killings. He said he met with Tausha Haight only twice, mostly recently on Tuesday, and she “was an incredibly nice lady.”
The home where the victims were found was decorated with Christmas lights and located in a neighborhood of newly built single-family houses on a ridge overlooking Enoch. It has a view of houses with snow-covered roofs and mountains in the distance. Half the surrounding block was cordoned off by police tape.
Community members who gathered at Enoch City Hall to listen to Thursday’s news conference said it was wrenching to have to tell their own children that their peers may not be at school the next day.
“We told them last night,” said city councilman Richard Jensen, a father of eight. “We gathered them around for a family prayer type of thing. We told them a family in town, everyone had been killed and when they show up to school tomorrow it’s possible kids will be missing.“
