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At Utah Execution, Woman Mourned Her Condemned Father and Her Grandma, His Victim

As Utah approaches its first execution since 2010 – set for early a.m. Thursday shortly after Wednesday midnight - a 27-year-old woman, Tressa Honie, planned to be there as a witness. But she is caught between anger and grief, because her father, Taberon Dave Honie, 48, is set to die by lethal injection for brutally killing her maternal grandmother in 1998, the AP’s Hannah Schoenbaum reports, in a detailed portrait.


For two decades, while her mother’s family has fought relentlessly for him to be put to death, Honie has kept in touch with her father in prison and even asked the parole board to commute his death sentence. Earlier this week, in her final visit to her father before his execution, Honie was grappling with how to carry out his dying wish: for her to move on and heal. “My mom’s side, they can heal together,” she said in an interview. “I feel like I have to heal alone.” She credits her father as her most supportive parent after drug use drove a wedge between her and her mother. Not only is she preparing to grieve her father, she’s also grieving the life she could have had if his crimes, committed while he was using drugs and drinking, hadn’t trapped her family in a cycle of self-destruction and left them all mourning the matriarch she believes could have kept them all in line.

 

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