The wife of the man charged with killing a nurse after storming Alta View Hospital has filed for divorce - a move her husband said is only to protect her financially.
Despite reports that the standoff was triggered when Richard Worthington's wife asked for a divorce, Karen Worthington said she never considered divorcing him until after he was taken to jail.Karen Worthington filed for divorce Tuesday in 3rd District Court and is asking that her husband pay alimony and support for their eight children. However, her husband is not likely to be in a position to do so if he is convicted of a long list of felonies, including aggravated murder, which can be punishable by the death penalty.
Karen Worthington and her attorney both spoke with the Deseret News but declined to discuss the details of the divorce. The court file has been sealed.
"I'm just trying to survive. It's tough," she said Friday.
Worthington said she filed for divorce hoping that ending the marriage would make it easier to get on with her life and support her family. "With eight kids, I'm at the mercy of the public," she said.
"I can't think of any way I'll ever get money from him," she said in an interview Thursday reported in a copyright story in the Salt Lake Tribune. "It's just something I had to do. But maybe something good will come of it."
Worthington said she saw no other alternative than divorce but says reports are false that she had asked her husband for a divorce before the incident.
"That isn't true. Divorce was never a part of it," she said. "That was just something a detective had overheard, or thought he overheard, and took liberties with."
"Rick and I were happily in love," she said. "In fact, we had a date planned to go out to dinner" the night of the standoff.
"We had a really good family before this happened," Karen Worthington said. "Look at what he's lost. He's lost his family, who miss him, and he's lost his freedom."
Worthington said she speaks with her husband from jail every day.
"He's back to his lovable self. He's a great father," she said. "He's heartbroken about what happened. He's very repentant. He feels so terrible about what happened and doesn't understand what happened."
Meanwhile, Aaron Worthington, 16, remains in a coma at LDS Hospital with injuries he received in a motorcycle accident just four hours after his father was arrested. Karen Worthington said her son is responsive and is improving, but slowly. He has been transferred to the hospital's rehabilitation unit and is in satisfactory condition.
Richard Worthington spoke to KSL-TV this week and said he unraveled the day before the siege. He won't say why.
"I went mentally off the deep end," Richard Worthington said.
Worthington, who is housed in the Salt Lake County Jail's mental health unit under observation pending a preliminary hearing Nov. 7, said he spent the day before the siege crying.
"Psychologists will find out what happened in my mind, whether or not I was in full control. I don't think I was."
Worthington, 39, is accused of storming the Women's Health Center at Alta View Hospital in Sandy late Sept. 20th. Armed with a shotgun, handgun and dynamite bomb, he allegedly shot nurse Karla Roth, then barricaded himself and the hostages - three of them infants - in a suite of offices. He surrendered to police 18 hours later.
In the interviews, Worthington talked emotionally about Roth, a mother of four, who police say was shot in the back as she tried to take a gun from Worthington shortly after the incident began.
His story, one he eventually may tell a jury, is that the shooting was an accident. He contends he was holding two guns in the same hand when Roth grabbed one. It went off, killing her. Worthington said he wished it had shot him.
"This poor lady didn't deserve to get hurt. How do you think it makes me feel to know a baby is without its mother?"
Worthington also said he never wanted to hold infants as hostages, but "the nurses wanted the babies with them. I love kids dearly. I would never hurt a child."
Worthington was said by authorities to have held a grudge against the hospital since his wife underwent a tubal ligation at Alta View without his consent two years earlier.
His remarks about infant hostages contradict those of nurse Margie Wyler, a hostage who helped deliver one of infants held during the siege and contends Worthington ordered her to keep the babies with him.
Worthington would not talk about any events that precipitated the standoff, saying only that he had planned to take his wife to dinner that night and then take her on a trip to the Caribbean the following week.
He also denied an impending divorce was the trigger. He said his wife filed for divorce after his arrest only to protect herself financially.