Put focus on heroes instead of tragedies

Newswise, it won't be that difficult to bid farewell to 2007. It was a most disturbing year. Even in a business where grief sells, headlines were filled with way too much of it.

The focal point was Trolley Square. Not that there weren't senseless murders before the fateful night of Feb. 12, 2007, or after, but when 18-year-old Sulejman Talovic turned an innocent Salt Lake City shopping mall into his personal killer video game, the resultant feeling of despair was almost palpable.

As it turned out, the five people he killed, along with four more he wounded, all pure strangers, would pale, statistically, alongside the 32 people Seung-Hui Cho gunned down two months later on the campus of Virginia Tech, thus rendering Trolley Square — and the later Omaha mall and Colorado church rampages — to a supporting-cast role in the year of senseless slayings.

But here in Utah, in 2007, Trolley Square was as awful as it got.

And every time it seemed that its bad taste was beginning to go away, something else outrageously bad and violent would happen.

In June, a human tattoo named Curtis Allgier, 27, got the drop on prison guard Stephen Anderson, 60, and allegedly shot him twice, killing him almost instantly. Allgier then carjacked an SUV and led police on a valleywide chase that ended after a brief siege at a west-side Arby's.

In July, a 9-year-old boy named Josue Contreras-Velasco was forced to stand naked in a trash can full of ice water as punishment for misbehaving. When he died of hypothermia, his two punishers, Pedro Gaucin-Canales, 36, and the victim's sister, Rebecca Hernandez-Velasco, 19, were arrested and charged with murder.

In October, tragedy came to the Deseret Morning News doorstep when mild-mannered, good-hearted Ann Poulson, a 68-year-old grandmother who worked in our accounting department, was strangled to death by James William Tolbert, 41, a convicted murderer out on parole whom Poulson had befriended and tried to help get back on his feet.

And just this past week, as horrified fellow customers looked on at a Salt Lake truck stop, Roger Malcolm, 51, shot and killed security guard Verne Walter Jenkins, 31, who was attempting to usher Malcolm off the premises because he became belligerent after standing in line for a pack of gum.

That wasn't all, not by a long shot. Wives died at the hands of their husbands this year, a whole family died at the hands of a mother, a man was shot and killed in his car waiting to go into a restaurant, two men were found dead in southern Utah near the home of a man who owed them money. The list goes on and on.