CONTENT WARNING: This article talks about domestic violence, religion, and murder of a whole family.
If you are feeling so much anger and rage and frustration about this crime, Gabrielle Blair perfectly articulates what so many have tripped over, and details how the LDS congregations work (and why it matters).
Meg Conley depicts what we’ve learned in the days and weeks since the Haight family (yes, the whole family) was killed, and how this trauma is so overwhelming for so many people.
From 2005 to 2010, Tausha Haight and I would greet each other by name several times a month. While her name was pronounced with an awe, and mine with an ash, neither of us had known others who were so close to sharing our name, and so, finding each other, we shared in this delight.
Tausha’s daughter Macie was the same age as my youngest. During church services, we would often pass each other on the way to and from the room set aside for nursing mothers. Later, we would try to help our three-year-olds acclimate to being in nursery without their moms. And in the last years, my family was in that area, Tausha and I would share a laugh over our cute daughters singing and saying their parts in the annual primary sacrament meeting.
Over a decade has passed since I could look out my front window and see her front yard. While we kept in touch with each other the way many do now—through social media—the chance to chat face-to-face always felt special.
Four weeks before she was murdered, Tausha and I shared a hug at the grocery store. We joked that so many of us only got to connect with each other at the store, and she reminded me of how old her kids were. We marveled that we both had high school seniors: this was her first time preparing for a child to leave the home, my last.
But I actually joined the conversation late. While I was looking for one thing in the store, my husband went to find another, saw Tausha with Mike, and called to them. I have been wondering, since I found out, if I had seen her in the store alone, if just she had crossed paths with just me, could she have said something?
Had she said something?
My community is known more by what surrounds us than by most of the people among us. From the Cedar City/Enoch area, a person can step foot in five National Parks after only 2-3 hours of driving. The one closest to us, though, is called Zion, a word that appears repeatedly in all the books of scripture of the Church. In latter-day revelation, Zion is defined as “the pure in heart.”
The history of Americans and Europeans traveling to the traditional homelands of the Nung’wu (Southern Paiute People) are filled with stories of hardship, loss, grief. One of the most notable stories includes Governor Boggs’ 1838 Missouri Executive Order which stated, “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State.”
My own ties to this community can be traced back to several ancestorial experiences, including in 1850 when my great-great-grandfather joined LDS prophet Brigham Young in leaving Salt Lake City to help organize a community in what is now Parowan, Utah. Known to the locals as the Mother Town, this religious community became the county seat in an area supported by farming, ranching, and mining. Within this small community is a tall memorial for a different great-great-grandfather who was “killed in cold blood” by a US Marshall “while under indictment for a misdemeanor” for practicing polygamy and resisting arrest.
Parowan is ten miles north of where Tausha was killed, and the home where she and her children were found is only fifteen miles away from me.
Abrahamic texts show the strained relationship between violence and religion has a centuries-old history. Killing in the name of religious progression—preservation?—has resulted in deaths too numerous to count. If we were able to talk to the various perpetrators of such slayings, I’m sure these people would feel the explanations reasonable, necessary, valid. One such justification appears in the first book of The Book of Mormon, when a teenager who will become a prophet feels directed by God to murder a societal oppressor because “It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.”
A mere four chapters into the text that serves as Another Testament of Christ, we see someone compelled to homicide in order to preserve the greater good. Maybe it was this text that was used when Latter-day Saints slaughtered Indigenous people in Timpanogos, or when creating a plan that would result in the Mountain Meadows massacre. Maybe this was the logic behind the creation of the Mormon Battalion, “the only religious unit in United States military history in federal service, recruited solely from one religious body and having a religious title as the unit designation.” Maybe one prophet having a vision that “This is the place” was a holy validation for these actions. Maybe, after being chased from Missouri, having their prophet killed, and then fleeing Illinois to avoid more violence, this felt like an appropriate “eye for an eye” situation. Maybe the continual violence pushed the mere mortals beyond the point where they could no longer follow the teachings to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”
Within the LDS faith, weddings are preferred to take place in temples, where husband and wife can be “sealed for time and for all eternity.” Part of that vow includes the statement “of your own free will and choice.” I truly believe Mike and Tausha were confident in their love and desire to care for each other when they got married. For many people in domestic violence situations, an intimate partner isn’t abusive to begin with.
And.
Someone who could commit a crime as brutal and heartless as what Mike did wasn’t a “nice guy” who snapped. This kind of violence doesn’t manifest itself from out of nowhere.
As news of this violence started spreading through the Enoch and Cedar City communities, there were several reactions. For a lot of us, it was pure shock; most people I knew who also knew Mike and Tausha had no idea of the abuse, the fear, the violence. When it became clear the third adult killed was Tausha’s mom, when we read that Tausha had filed for divorce, almost every woman I talked to assumed the same thing: her mom was there to help get her out.
There were many people, though, who upon hearing the same piece of information mentioned the possibility of Tausha doing something that made Mike lose it.
“What if he wanted to try therapy, to fix things, and she wouldn’t?”
“Maybe he couldn’t imagine life without custody of his kids.”
“Maybe he had some mental illness or strain, and this was the last straw.”
“Maybe he couldn’t bear the thought of losing his eternal family.”
Of course, there is no way we can truly know what happened that terrible day. While detectives and forensic scientists can piece together when and where Mike fired a gun at his mother-in-law, his wife, his high school senior, his twelve-year-old, each of his seven-year-old twins, and his son who hadn’t even started kindergarten, what happened in the minutes or hours before this is not clear. What is clear is Tausha sought help; she was looking for a way out.
And familiarity with violence sparked something within Mike. Upon hearing his wife wanted to live a different way, he became certain this kind of massacre was THE solution to a problem.
Is this what happens when a religion mythologizes killing in order to preserve a belief? Is this what happens when a man is certain the worst thing that can happen to him is not being part of an eternal family?
There are no answers—not really.
It's a complicated thing, to have one’s genuinely fond memories of a person collide with incomprehensibly horrendous actions. Society often declares that we should not speak ill of the dead. When someone gets baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they make a covenant with God to mourn with those who mourn, to comfort those who stand in need of comfort.
I want to extend this grace to the people who commented on Mike’s now-deleted obituary. Perhaps their words were crafted in an effort to help his family mourn a sorrow I simply can’t imagine. I want to believe they hoped to do something kind as a way of helping his mom who so many knew as a beloved elementary teacher. I want to trust this wasn’t a case of “the good ole boys club” where people were ignoring the horror he’d created.
But I can’t.
People knew of the abuse.
Police were aware of the violence – to some extent.
Non-related adults had filed reports.
After many tragedies, people share this Mister Roger quote: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. '"
A lot of people who were supposed to be helpers let Tausha and her children down. Since news of my friend’s passing, I have wondered again and again if her conversations about the harm she was enduring might have been taken more seriously, might have been addressed differently if Mike hadn’t come across to so many people as kind and gentle and funny.
Why didn’t helpers actively intervene when leaders of the LDS church have been very outspoken about the dangers of abuse, even stating in The Family: A Proclamation to the World, “We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God.”
And how do close-knit LDS communities like mine reconcile that message with the rest of the paragraph, which reads, “Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.”
Is the ideal of “families can be together forever” emboldening communities like mine to prioritize what they see in a man’s demeanor over a woman’s statements of abuse? Are LDS women who confess to being in abusive situations still being instructed to be patient, loving, and kind instead of being believed? And if she is believed, do the many leaders of congregations get training on how to help a woman escape? Does the gracious volunteerism that supports families moving in and out of neighborhoods extend to a woman and her children when the head of the household is a danger to their existence?
I don’t know the answers. But I am certain, if the rhetoric proclaiming divorce to be the worst thing that can happen in the “eternal scheme of things,” more people like me will have to mourn the unnecessary and preventable death of more friends like Tausha.
Thank you for putting this out to the world. This is a very important perspective and it needs to be talked about more.
Tasha, this was well thought out and echoes so many of my own feelings. Thank you for sharing this!