5 suicides jolt southern Utah

Third in a six-part series

MOAB — In the late summer of 2004, four teenagers linked by small-town connections and eastern Utah roots took their own lives within two months of each other.

Stephen, Mario, Brandon and Katherine hanged themselves in their own bedrooms. Each left a suicide note. And in every case, a parent or guardian was in the house close by while each looped something around his or her neck and leaned forward against the noose.

School had not yet started when Stephen Cannistraci died July 30, 2004. The boy heading into his senior year at Moab's Grand County High School was the first in a series of suicides that made real every community's worst nightmare about teenage suicide — the bizarre dynamic of what is commonly known as "copycatting."

A month after Stephen died, just one week into classes at Grand County Middle School, administrators were horrified to learn eighth-grader Mario Hernandez also was dead. At 13, he would be the youngest.

Then unbelievably, on Sept. 13, just a few days before he was to be reunited with his father in Moab, Stephen's older brother, Brandon Cannistraci, 19, hanged himself in a St. George home where he was living temporarily.

And 11 days after that, in neighboring Carbon County, 17-year-old Katherine Langdon wrote the following in pages of notes explaining her actions before she, too, hanged herself:

"The things I hated most about Stephen and Brandon was I never understood why. So I'm going to explain why I'm doing this."

During the time period that became a season of suicide, another girl, 17-year-old Kelly Sowell, lived two doors down from Mario Hernandez in Moab's Grand Oasis mobile home park. She also knew Stephen and Brandon Cannistraci. In fact, her co-worker at the local pharmacy — the boys' stepmother — apparently showed Kelly photos of the two boys in their caskets.

Kelly Sowell was in the middle of a traumatic few years and at the center of a crime that shook Moab that is still playing out in Utah's Court of Appeals.

The girl had been sexually harassed and assaulted in 2002 by a well-liked female coach and teacher. The woman — so popular she'd been chosen to run the Olympic torch through town during the 2002 Winter Games — was convicted of several felonies and sentenced to prison for crimes against Kelly.

But neither time nor the court conviction in September 2003 dulled emotion over the case for some in the community of 4,800.

Some students and people around town continued to torment Kelly mercilessly. "Whore," they'd call her. "Lesbian."