It was Aug. 27, 2020, the day Enoch police responded to the home of Michael and Tausha Haight after allegations that Michael had assaulted Macie, the couple’s oldest daughter, over several years.
That day, an Enoch police officer screened Tausha Haight through the Lethality Assessment Protocol, a national tool designed to identify risks of lethal violence and save lives. But according to a copy of the assessment, which the Deseret News obtained through a public records request from the city of Enoch, Tausha Haight’s answers to most of the questions were “no.”
When asked if there was anything else that was worrying her about her safety, this was her recorded response:
“I don’t think so. I have a backbone. I don’t think so.”
Through that assessment, the Enoch police officer determined Tausha Haight was “not assessed as High-Danger.”
Fast forward more than two years later, to Jan. 4. Tausha Haight, her mother Gail Earl, and all five of her children were found dead in their Enoch home. Police say Michael Haight, 42, murdered his family before turning the gun on himself. It happened two weeks after Tausha Haight filed for divorce.
The case sent shockwaves across not just the small, rural Utah city, but across the nation. The community was left with more questions than answers. How could this happen? Were there no warning signs?
It also came as state leaders including Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson were gearing up for a major push for legislation to require police officers across the state of Utah to conduct lethality assessments when responding to domestic violence cases.
Henderson believes the Lethality Assessment Protocol could have saved the life of her cousin, Amanda Mayne, who was killed by Mayne’s ex-husband Taylor Martin last August. Police agencies across Utah have voluntarily used the 11-question assessment for years, though no assessment was completed in Mayne’s case.
The Haight case is a tragic reminder that even though lethality assessments are important tools, they’re not a cure-all for intimate partner violence — and it underscores the excruciating complexities in domestic violence cases, made even more complex when children are involved.
That was the takeaway from multiple interviews the Deseret News conducted with state and city officials, domestic violence service providers and national domestic violence experts about the Haight family, Enoch police’s lethality assessment, and whether there were missed opportunities that could have saved their lives.
“It’s heartbreaking. We have to do better,” Henderson said, including more funding for domestic violence service providers and better lethality assessment training for law enforcement officers.
“And we have to help the community at large understand that, yeah, you might have a backbone. But you aren’t alone.”
Tausha Haight’s lethality assessment
Lethality assessment documents are typically classified as private records to protect a domestic violence victim’s safety. But because Tausha Haight is no longer alive, Enoch city officials, after initially denying the Deseret News’ records request, released the record because it would not “increase her risk of safety and does not violate her privacy.”
For the assessment, an Enoch police officer recorded Tausha Haight’s answers to questions about her husband, Michael Haight. Questions included: whether he “ever used a weapon against you or threatened you with a weapon,” whether he has “threatened to kill you or your children,” or if she thought he “might try to kill you?”
Tausha Haight answered “no” to each of those questions, but she did answer “yes” to a question about whether he had a gun or if he could get to one easily. She also answered “yes” to a question about whether she had left him or “separated after living together or being married.”
According to the assessment, the officer did not call the domestic violence hotline, and Tausha Haight did not speak to a hotline advocate. She also did not consent to a domestic violence service provider follow up.
This assessment happened the same day police responded to the Haight’s home to investigate allegations of child abuse, according to police reports previously obtained by the Deseret News. The Utah Division of Child and Family Services was already aware of the case, and the officer responded alongside a division official.
Tausha told police she did not want to press criminal charges, and she “indicated that she is in hopes that this case will be a wake-up call for Michael,” according to a police report.
According to the police report, Macie — who was 17 when her father killed her and was at the time 14 or 15 when police responded in 2020 — told police about three instances of alleged physical abuse from her father. She also claimed Michael would talk about “how stupid and lazy Tausha is” and would take Tausha’s phone in attempt to “keep her from leaving the house.” Macie told police the first instance of abuse came about three years prior in the family’s piano room.
“Her father became angry at her and grabbed her by the shoulders. He shook her and her head banged into the wooden piece along the back of the couch,” the report reads. “She stated that she was terrified that he was going to hurt her. She stated that she did not suffer any injury from this event. She was mostly scared.”
In another instance roughly two years before the 2020 report, Haight allegedly grabbed his daughter “around the neck and choked her” while they were in the pantry area of the family’s kitchen, the report says.
“She stated that she was very afraid that he was going to keep her from breathing and kill her,” the officer’s report reads. “I asked her if she actually lost her breath. She stated that she did not. She stated that he did not choke her.”
When asked during her lethality assessment whether her husband had “ever tried to choke (strangle) you,” Tausha Haight replied “no.” She had the same answer for a question about whether he was “violently or constantly jealous” or if he “controls most of your daily activities.”
Why didn’t assessment prevent the violence?
The assessment alone does not paint a full picture of all the allegations police were aware of that day, particularly the accusations regarding Macie. But lethality assessments are “only used in situations of intimate partner violence,” noted Kimmi Wolf, spokeswoman for the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition. They’re not designed to gauge risk of child abuse, “so there are limitations,” she said.
Wolf also noted “so many factors” influence the effectiveness of lethality assessments, including whether a victim feels comfortable or safe sharing information with a police officer in that moment. Though it’s a “very statistically effective tool,” she said, it’s just that, “a tool.”
“It’s always easy to speculate, but so much of that is nuanced. It’s the mindset of the victim at that time, it’s his or her willingness, the officer being able to convey his or her intentions and good will, it really is so nuanced and really subjective,” Wolf said.
It’s also difficult to say whether the assessment was executed perfectly that day, Wolf said.
“It’s so much more than an officer just going through and reading the questions. He or she really needs to show concern and be very intentional about not forcing a situation,” Wolf said. “One of the key components of a lethality assessment is to contact a local service provider in front of the victim, giving him or her no mandate to talk to the person but for the victim to overhear this officer sharing his or her concerns with a service provider.”
Reading the lethality assessment alone, Wolf said, “isn’t going to tell the full story” and will likely “minimize the efforts of the responding officer more times than not.”
Now knowing what would eventually happen to the Haight family, “it’s so easy to say, ‘It wasn’t enough,’” Wolf said. “So all we can do is just kind of trust that the officer did the best that they could at that time because we don’t have any other information.”
Enoch City Manager Rob Dotson, who has been fielding media requests for the Enoch Police Department, told the Deseret News the “assessment itself is very basic, and without evidence — visual evidence — it’s sometimes the only way to assess the potential for lethality.”
“We can’t read people’s minds,” he said. “We can use the tools available to us to do our best in finding avenues of helping people.”
It’s also important to recognize so much more could have happened within the privacy of the Haight family home between that day in 2020, and the day of their murder on Jan. 4.
“Domestic violence happens all around us, and we can’t legislate people’s minds, what they think or how they behave behind closed doors,” Dotson said, but he added officials can continue to make sure Utahns know “there are resources out there to help.”
“There are so many willing and caring people who just want to help individuals escape or avoid domestic violence. But there’s no coercion. We can’t force people to do that,” Dotson said.
Most of all this case highlights “these situations are very complex,” Dotson said. “We’re trying to manage the information that comes to us as law enforcement, as those who are involved in helping victims or potential victims of domestic violence and the complexity of relationships, the complexity of family dynamics, and the context of situations themselves are not as simple as we would like them to be.”
As for Tausha Haight’s answer that she has “a backbone” when asked if there was anything else worrying her about her safety, Dotson said that response itself “helps us to understand there is a lot of complexity to the answer.”
It’s impossible to know everything going on in Tausha’s mind that day, but to Dotson, it seems “she felt she had the strength and fortitude to overcome the situation at the time.”
“She has a backbone? Absolutely,” Dotson said. “Possibly one of the most courageous people we can possibly meet. We all only hope to have that kind of fortitude and stamina. However, there needs to be a willingness to get help, that’s part of having strength in relying on others.”
But if anyone feels like they can handle abusive behavior on their own, Dotson said “we can’t control other people, and there are resources to help, so full of caring and loving people that the best thing for people to do in those situations is to be willing to get as much help as people will give.”
Dotson also said it’s possible Tausha Haight didn’t feel she needed or wanted help because perhaps at the time she loved her husband and wanted to work things out. “Part of marriage is forgiveness, is hoping for better outcomes and for change,” Dotson said. “This was a potential response to that lethality assessment. We can assume that she loved her husband, she stayed with him, she wanted him to change, and she wanted to see change.”
Victims also often have very good reasons for their decisions based on their needs at the time, said Kait Sorensen, executive director of the nonprofit victim services provider Canyon Creek Services, which serves Iron, Beaver and Garfield counties.
“There’s also a huge unknown in her understanding of the danger of her situation, because it all depended on the actions of another individual,” Sorensen said. “So, we expect survivors to be clairvoyant about what’s going to happen to them. We expect law enforcement to be that way and providers to be that way, and we’re just not.”
“The only person who knows what they’re going to do,” Sorensen said, “is that individual that is enacting violence upon somebody else.”
Strangulation: ‘Calling card of a killer’
To some national domestic violence experts, there likely were missed opportunities to recognize the danger Tausha Haight and her kids were in as early as that day police responded to their home in 2020.
The biggest red flag? The allegations that Michael Haight had “choked” his daughter.
“If a victim of domestic violence is strangled even one time, she is 750% more likely to be killed by the person who strangled her,” Strangulation Training Institute experts wrote in a report issued last summer highlighting important takeaways from another high-profile murder case with ties to Utah, the murder of Gabby Petito.
Two of the report’s authors — Gael Strack, CEO and co-founder of Alliance for HOPE International, who also oversees the Alliance’s Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention, and Joe Bianco, the institute’s law enforcement support coordinator — told the Deseret News they’ve been pointing to the Enoch case as an example in recent trainings.
“Anytime you read five kids have been killed, the wife and grandma, you’re going like, ‘Holy cow, what the heck happened and what was missed?’” Strack said.
The case highlights “the dangers that somebody with a strangulation history poses and why it’s such a red flag,” Bianco said.
“Not only do we call the work we do the last warning shot, strangulation is also the calling card of a killer,” Strack said. “We’re not saying every strangler becomes a killer, but what we’re finding is every killer has strangled before if you’re able to dig deep enough.”
Without “pointing fingers” at police or others, Bianco said there may have been a missed opportunity because recognizing strangulation and its dangers can often require “very specialized training,” and “then when you start to get into pediatric strangulation that’s even more specialized, and we just don’t have the same resources, data and studies that exist now for adult strangulation cases.” Plus, “children have their own set of complications in terms of interviewing them.”
“All these things require specialized professionals to do, and oftentimes officers don’t realize how much they know or how much they can do,” Bianco said.
Strack said the Enoch case underscores why it’s important that everyone responding to domestic violence — including law enforcement and service providers — are “trained on the danger of pediatric strangulation.”
“Anytime anyone strangles, (even if) it’s a dog or a pet, that’s a red flag,” Strack said. “Then they get to their children and the wife.”
She also noted survivors often “don’t use the word strangulation. They will say, ‘He grabbed my neck, or he choked me.’ And sometimes if you don’t ask the right question, they’re not going to answer it.”
Even if a law enforcement official has been trained in the Lethality Assessment Program, Strack said they also should be “trained on how to identify and interview and document a strangulation case.”
What more should Utah do?
Earlier this week, Henderson, the lieutenant governor, joined the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition on Capitol Hill to ask lawmakers for more investment to keep victim service providers afloat.
She and Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, the sponsor of SB117, the bill to require law enforcement officers statewide to conduct lethality assessments when responding to a report of domestic violence, both told the Deseret News the Enoch killings showcase that while lethality assessments are important, they’re not perfect at preventing killings.
Still, expanding them statewide is a step in the right direction, they said.
“There are a lot of things that we can be doing differently and doing better,” Henderson said. “I think this year we’re taking a big step in the right direction. Our hearts break for the people of Enoch, for the families who are affected by these types of intimate partner murders. But we’re learning, I hope.”
Weiler said the protocol is absolutely not a “magic elixir” to preventing all cases of lethal violence.
Unfortunately, he said police chiefs have told him domestic violence victims will often stay with or return to their abusers for complicated reasons, “sometimes that financial dependence, emotional dependence, they’re in love, whatever.”
“So we know that this is not going to fix all the problems,” Weiler said. “But had she answered yes to a few more questions, under my bill the hope would be she would be warned what kind of danger she’s in and she’d be immediately put in touch with a women’s shelter or a therapist or a counselor.”
To Weiler, the big takeaway from the Enoch case is “we all need to be paying more attention to our neighbors, our friends and our family members. I’m not trying to blame anyone, but I’m sure there are other red flags that people now are like, ‘Oh my gosh, why didn’t I (do anything)?’”
Still, the Lethality Assessment Protocol is valuable, he said. “It allows the police officer to dig a little bit into the complexities of that intimate relationship and get some information that might potentially save a life. But it’s not going to save all lives.”
If there’s more law enforcement officials, service providers or state officials can do — whether it’s finding ways to improve the Lethality Assessment Protocol or expanding services — Weiler and Henderson said they should be looked into.
“We can’t ever stop trying to do better, to be better, and do whatever we can to try to prevent these tragedies from happening in the future,” Weiler said. “I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t have all the answers. But I do believe SB117 is a giant step in the right direction.”
For Enoch specifically, Dotson said local therapists and other organizations have been pulling together an Enoch community trauma recovery program that’s seeking donations through the Family Support Center in Cedar City. For more information, visit familysupportutah.org.
“We would all hope that individuals who are experiencing domestic violence ... would be willing to at least reach out to someone,” Dotson said. “Those who care and who are engaged are diligently trying to stop the cycle. ... I think it comes down to we really need to have our eyes open.”
Contributing: Kyle Dunphey
