A newspaper obituary praises a Utah father accused of killing his family.

A newspaper obituary paying tribute to a Utah man accused of fatally killing seven members of his family in a murder-suicide has been removed, the paper’s publisher said Tuesday with an apology.

Michael Haight, 42, fatally shot wife Tausha Haight, 40, mother-in-law Gail Earl, 78, and the couple’s five children, aged 4 to 17, before taking his own life earlier this month, police said.

Tausha and Michael Height.
Tausha and Michael Height.via Facebook

But a recently deleted obituary in The Spectrum painted a laudatory picture of Michael Haight with no mention of the January 4th murder-suicide.

The article, which was not written by a newspaper employee, said that Haight “excelled in everything he did” and that the father viewed each of his children as “a truly cherished miracle.”

“Obituaries can be written and sent by funeral homes, as was the case here,” Gannett, owner of The Spectrum, said in a statement.

“Spectrum has removed the obituary due to the circumstances and sincerely regrets any trouble this may have caused.”

A woman who answered the phone at the Southern Utah mortuary confirmed that the funeral home provided services to Michael Haight. But she declined to discuss how business was involved in writing the obituary.

Gun violence advocate Shannon Watts posted an obituary over the weekend and tagged it to her 587,000 Twitter followers.

On Tuesday, Watts said she was stunned to read Haight’s praise.

“I was shocked that this man’s obituary had a picture of him and talked about him flatteringly, and did not mention that his wife and children were not among his survivors – because he killed them,” Watts said.


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