Their two worlds collided this summer when 150 federal agents swooped into the region, arresting 26 people at gunpoint and charging them with looting Indian graves and stealing priceless archaeological treasures from public and tribal lands. Seventeen of those arrested, most of them handcuffed and shackled, were from Blanding, including some of the town's most prominent citizens: Harold Lyman, 78, grandson of the pioneering Mormon family that founded the town. David Lacy, 55, high school math teacher and brother of the county sheriff. And 60-year-old Jim Redd, along with his wife and adult daughter. The next day, the doctor drove to a pond on his property and killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning. Another defendant, from Santa Fe, N.M., shot himself a week later. The suicides horrified this town of about 4,000 with many bitterly blaming the government. More than a thousand people attended Redd's funeral, even as the mayor denounced the FBI and Bureau of Land Management agents as "storm troopers" and the sheriff called for a formal investigation. For many, the recriminations and grief masked more complicated questions — questions that have dogged the town for decades. "I'm not against them enforcing the laws, but why do they have to kill us at the same time," says Austin Lyman, a case worker at the senior center, who has vehement opinions about the raids, and his own unique way of expressing them: "Like Jackals from hell they came,
With bullet proof vests and guns, They came to arrest old men." Lyman, a burly, ruddy-faced man of 62, penned "Paradise Has Been Raided Again" on June 10, the day of the raids. He reads it aloud, eyes burning, voice cracking with emotion...read more
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