Salt Lake County | featured news

Robert Kirby is off today. This is a reprint of an earlier column.
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I was raised to be a good Mormon boy. My parents took me to church. I was taught to pray, take the sacrament, pay tithing and to believe that Heavenly Father would get even with me if I didn’t.
For years, I never doubted the truthfulness of what I was taught. This is not surprising considering that virtually anything will make sense if it’s all you know.
I was sitting outside the bishop’s office one afternoon when doubt firs...

For the second year in a row, Westminster College will not publish the results of a campus survey about sexual assault — even as the federal government is investigating the school for potentially mishandling such a case.
In 2016, school officials said few students participated.

An appellate attorney for a Utah death row inmate is asking the state’s highest court to follow through on a promise made nearly a decade ago: The justices said they would reverse death penalty convictions if inmates couldn’t get an adequate defense.
The time is now, attorney Samuel Newton wrote in a recent motion in the appeal for Douglas Anderson Lovell, who in 2015 was sentenced to be executed for killing 39-year-old Joyce Yost in 1985 to keep her from testifying that he had previously raped...

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Halfway through her Mormon mission, Sariah Warnick had to stop being what she was: a missionary.
No more knocking on doors in a quixotic quest for converts. No more handing out pamphlets on the street about her religion’s birth here on Earth or its views of life after death.

Crews responded to a wildfire near Alpine on Saturday evening.
The human-caused fire burned 50 acres of brush and grass on the hill east of the city, according to fire officials.
The Salt Lake Tribune will update this story as information becomes available.
tfrandsen@sltrib.com
Twitter: @tiffany_mf

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Operations tapered off on the Brian Head Fire as more firefighters were sent to battle other blazes on Saturday.
The Great Basin Incident Management Team said it intends to turn control over to local teams on Monday, the one-month mark for the fire, which torched 71,673 acres since a weed-burning project sparked it on June 17.

An 11-year-old girl died Friday after falling off a truck in a Nephi parade, police reported Saturday.
The girl had been on a flatbed truck during the Heritage & Western Parade Friday evening and slipped while trying to get down, according to a news release from the Juan County Sheriff’s Office. The truck had been moving slowly but was pulling a trailer, which hit her, the release stated.
The girl was pronounced dead at Central Valley Medical Center, according to the release.
The parade is part...

A pregnant Fatima Mehmedovic and her husband left war-ravaged Bosnia to seek a better life in the United States in May 1997.
On Saturday, a little more than 20 years later, she raised her right hand and took the oath that finally makes her a U.S. Citizen, like her two sons.
“We found our peace here,” said Mehmedovic, 44, now and a resident of West Jordan where she works for a grocery store chain. “There is so much here that makes us feel good and comfortable.”
Mehmedovic was one of 13 refugees f...

American flags and blue ribbons lined Mustang Trail Way outside of Herriman High School on Saturday morning. Inside the school’s dimly lit auditorium, solemn officers grieved at a memorial service for Unified police dog Dingo, a 7-year-old Belgian Malinois who was shot and killed on July 6.
“He was my fishing buddy, my confidant, my constant companion, my ever loyal partner and my protector,” said Sgt. Chad Reyes, who had been Dingo’s handler for five years.
Dingo had been with Reyes, ever since...

It’s déjà vu all over again. But as West Jordan makes a plan to replace its fifth city manager in six years, at least one thing is different: This time it’s amicable.
The City Council voted unanimously at a special meeting Friday to accept Mark Palesh’s resignation. Palesh left retirement to take over as city manager in 2015 amid an array of lawsuits, infighting and power plays. Over the past 18 months, he’s accomplished what he’d set out to do in the position, he said in a letter sent to the c...