ASH FORK, Ariz. — Almost as soon as Heikki and Ana Ingstrom moved here, trouble started.

In phone calls to friends and relatives, Heikki, a legendary Utah ultra-marathon runner, said animosity in the town was growing against the couple because Ana was Mexican and was teaching at the local school.

"He was getting really frustrated," said Barry Makarewicz, who stayed in touch with his longtime friend during the year after Heikki left a good job, his adopted hometown and his beloved running community in Salt Lake City.

Makarewicz says he spoke to Heikki on the phone six months ago. "I could tell that things were really going badly."

A week later, Heikki was dead.

"The common joke around here is that everyone is in the witness protection program. I don't know what people do. People come down here and they disappear." — Daniel Repony, who recently retired to Ash Fork and is restoring an old air field

Ash Fork, population 450, is the flagstone mecca of the United States. The decorative rock is mined in quarries near here, and for acre after acre, bundles of flagstone are lined up ready for shipping.

When Ana was hired as a math teacher in the Ash Fork School District, Ana and Heikki Ingstrom rented a mobile home six miles from town, off a county road on barren land in an area called Kaibab Estates.

This is water-hauling country.

There are some rural Arizona communities with no central water system and no wells. The water is down 2,000 feet, out of reach of most affordable residential drilling. So, like their neighbors, Heikki and Ana paid a penny a gallon to fill up at communal water-filling stations in Ash Fork and cart their water back home.

Right away, the couple began to meet people in the community.

Karen Myers lives in another mobile home a football's throw from where Heikki and Ana lived. She was the only witness to an incident police say killed Heikki.

"He is missed," Myers said. "I think about him all the time, but all I see is him falling. Over and over, him falling."

Myers and a collection of relatives moved in mid-October. Myers hadn't unpacked her alarm clock yet and went over to ask if the Ingstroms could give her family a wake-up knock the next morning. "That's how we met," she said. "I'd only known him a couple of months before he died, but we knew him pretty well.

"That guy loved dogs. Man, did he love those dogs."

Along with cats, turtles and birds, Heikki also had Maxie, a very protective heeler, and Amadeus, a big Heinz-57.

"Then he heard about someone with puppies," Myers remembered. "He was going to take one but ended up with three."