From The Spectrum, the Southern Utah newspaper (published in St. George):
Family, friends have fond memories of Arnett
By ED KOCIELA
CEDAR CITY -- The tears had temporarily dried, but pain still creased the faces of a family in mourning.
"It is such a loss. ... He had so much more, so many more kids to help and teach," said Ann Kirton of her brother Anson Arnett, the 31-year-old group home counselor who died from injuries inflicted when, police say, he was allegedly attacked Monday night by two 17-year-olds with a baseball bat at the Maximum Life Skills Academy in Cedar City. "There was no need for any of this to happen. He would have said (to the two suspects), 'If this is what you need to do, you'll pay the price,' and he would have handed them the keys to the van. That's what's so tragic about this."
Family members -- his mother, one of his two sisters and one of his four brothers -- lovingly described a young man who was independent, warm, kind, scholarly and determined in the face of physical shortcomings that would have hindered many others.
He was told once when he wanted to learn to play the saxophone and guitar that because of a problem with his hands, he'd never be able to do so.
Arnett mastered both instruments.
He devoured books, loved art, writing and the arts in general, from drama to dance, in the rough and tumble world of high school sports and athleticism.
"The environment didn't really foster many of the things he liked," Kirton said.
"His interests were somewhere else," his brother, Adon, said.
And, when taunted or treated unfairly, instead of lashing out, he forgave.
"He's unlike any people I know," said his brother. "He reminds me, when I think of the nonviolence, of Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr."
"At one point (after his death) I became very angry, but I thought that's not what Anson would want," said his mother, Cheryl Fansler of Parowan. "The only time I saw him angry was when somebody made assumptions about his art or some of his writings before he perfected them, then he'd get really upset."
He was a committed educator.
"The last conversation I had with him, he was distraught because he didn't feel the school was doing enough to educate the kids he was working with," his brother said. "He had a teaching degree, was well-read, knew what it was like to educate. He was spending time outside of work exploring better ways of teaching these kids. He didn't believe, like most of society believes, that a kid gets into one of these homes and is lost."
He also had a great love of nature.
"One time he went to camp at the Parowan Gap," his brother said. "It was one of his favorite places because of his real affinity for Native American folklore and art, and he cared deeply about their spirituality. When he was driving, an eagle flew right in front of his car. He couldn't avoid it and hit it."
"He was so horrified," his mother said, picking up the story. "He got out, wrapped the eagle in his sleeping bag and drove all the way back to Cedar City to see if he could find somebody to help it. It was night and he couldn't, so he took the eagle back to his camp and put the eagle in his sleeping bag. I guess he just slept on the ground. The next morning, he woke up and the eagle woke up with him, then just flew off."
Kirton, who now lives in Evergreen, Colo., said she remembers a time when Arnett came to visit her while she was living in Steamboat Springs.
She said she waited and waited for his arrival, staying up most of the night without any sign of her brother.
"The next morning he drove in with a loaf of French bread and twigs all over his car," she said. "He smiled and said, 'I got lost so I slept in the field.'"
His thirst for adventure led him to travel throughout British Columbia, carrying only a backpack and small tent, his mother said.
"He wanted to go all the way to Alaska, but I was able to talk him out of it," she said. "He loved the outdoors."
"The outdoors was like his church," his brother, who lives in Portland, said. "Even if he was riding in a car, he couldn't stand it if the windows were up."
"He always slept with the windows open, no matter what the temperature was," Kirton added.
Arnett's brother spoke of character and courage.
"We're painting him out to be a really great guy who cared and looked out for others," he said. "He also had personal struggles. He struggled personally with the physical needs of his life because people are judgmental and it's hard to find just human needs in a situation like that.
"We didn't grow up rich, we grew up in a small town in rural Utah without a ton of opportunities, a single parent who worked hard for us, and he took that and used it as an advantage instead of a struggle."
"If he could say something now, he would probably want some sort of reform for homes like these," Kirton said. "Shutting down every group home in Southern Utah is not the answer. Refining the regulations is important to make sure this doesn't happen to somebody else."
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Something very sad about this situation as it existed, way before the horror of a murder...
This nice, kind, outdoor-loving person seemed to really want to help wayward children. Coming from a large family in Utah, I can imagine that he was Mormon, and looked to an employment offer from a group home of the same persuasion. He had only worked for the place for six months or so, and was speaking to his friends and family about his unhappiness with the program of this home for his charges. As a teacher, he was aware of the poor education being offered the kids. It just seems that here was a young man with a real mission to help, and he was dumped into the reality of "teen help" in Utah. Notice that he said **reform**, not closing all the group homes in Utah was needed. He obviously had been aware of this option, maybe from conversations with folks about his concern for the teens in his care and their reaction that we should make all those facilities go away.
Who knows how abusive this home was. Its managers were cut from the Teen Help model, and could the young pup that was raking in...let's see, $4500 x 11 boys = almost $50,000 a month... try something new and truly therapeutic when he learned from The Masters that *nobody really cares* what you do with these kids, as long as you'll take them out of circulation. Were they allowed to talk to peers? Were they allowed to communicate with their parents? Were they being given help from accreditated licensed counselors? Arnett was a credentialed teacher, and, extrapolating his comments to his family, he appears to have been very unhappy with how his job was playing out. Would he have quit in frustration in the near future, had he been allowed to have a future? The boys had been nearing "graduation", yet had the threat of being incarcerated longer ("...they were caught cheating and were not ready to go home") pushed them to far toward violent escape?
This is not about a terrible crime, nor about the young men who committed it. This post is about the place those young men were in, how abusive, how like an old "snake-pit" mental hospital, how like WWASPS, the environment was.
Should all the group homes in Southern Utah be shut down? I think so, if Utah cannot stand up and enforce the laws that it has in place to protect the young people [these 2 boys were from "back East"] sent to Utah.
I'm sorry, but Utah has become a black hole to me. Forget its natural beauty, forget its great work with geneology, forget its successful hosting of the Olympics. Utah is synonomous with all the hick, red-neck, polygamous, downright nasty humans in this country. How can this state and its poli-theology support family values, when such depravity is going on within its borders? How come the planet seems tipped, with all the slime of youth correction sliding into the red rock canyons of one corner of one state [not including the red-neck abusive facilities in Mormon Idaho]. If laws exist, they should be enforced, and this group home should have been shut down if it did not benefit its charges.
