Home & Garden

and attack defendant, so he shot her, as well. … When asked about (Shelly), defendant had no explanation as to why he shot her.”

According to an autopsy report, the gunshot wound to Metcalf’s head had stippling around it, indicating it came at very close range, while a muzzle print was visible on Shelly’s right cheek, indicating she was shot at point-blank range.

“Speculation surrounds the actual reason for their demise at defendant’s hands, as there are only four people who know the actual truth and three of them are deceased,” the probation report reads. “Regardless, defendant is singularly responsible for extinguishing the light of his three victims from the community and must be held accountable.”

Shelly’s sister was the first to find the grisly scene around 8 a.m. and sent her brother running to a nearby community center where a relative worked. “Auntie,” he reportedly told her, “they’re dead.” While Shelly and Metcalf were pronounced dead when an ambulance arrived on scene, Margarett Moon was found to still have a pulse and rushed to the hospital, where she was deemed brain dead a couple hours later and taken off life support at the request of her family.

By the time investigators arrived on scene, where they found Shelly’s 11-year-old brother and 13-year-old sister in shock, her wrapped in a blanket and shaking uncontrollably and him pale and swaying slowly from side to side, Johnson’s attempted escape was well under way and he’d enlisted the help of his mother, Melissa Sanchez-Johnson and her friend Von Keener, to flee the county and the state. According to the probation report, investigators used a GPS device installed in Sanchez-Johnson’s car by the used car dealership she bought it from as a condition of her car loan to track the vehicle’s movements. Ultimately, they worked with the Utah State Highway Patrol, which used a spike strip and a high-risk traffic stop to take Johnson, his mother and Keener into custody.

While Johnson is perhaps the only person who knows the precise motive for the killings, the probation report makes clear he has long been on a path of escalating violence and criminality. Soon after his parents separated when he was 9 years old, leading to Sanchez-Johnson living homeless in her car and his father moving to Mexico, Johnson began falling into trouble. He was arrested on a vandalism charge when he was about 10. A few years later, he was arrested again for assault likely to cause great bodily injury, followed by arrests for resisting arrest, burglary, criminal threats, threatening to kill his girlfriend’s mother, violating his probation and, finally, assaulting his uncle with a deadly weapon. He told his probation officer that he’d started drinking alcohol excessively and regularly by his 16th birthday, around the same time he started regularly using cocaine.

In a letter to the court, Margarett’s older sister Cassandra Moon described herself as “shattered,” saying Johnson’s crimes had reverberating impacts on a family he was a part of. She said she used to babysit Johnson and his brothers.

“I used to watch them, protect them and treated them like my own kids,” Cassandra Moon wrote. “Never in a million years would I have imagined that one of them would end up killing my baby sister, my beautiful niece and my brother- in-law.”

In the letters, many family members registered their objection to the plea deal Johnson reached with prosecutors, which could leave him eligible for parole under state law. Some talked of the challenges they have faced in trying to overcome the trauma inflected by the murders and to come to grips with all that was lost.

“We all lost a beautiful Native family that was going to do good things for Indian families and communities in providing safety, good healthy healing events and hope for our future,” wrote Jewel Frank, who’d been Metcalf’s foster mother, telling the court that when she thinks of the killings she still becomes overwhelmed, sometimes throwing up, her body trembling and her heart racing.

Fawn Lopez described her cousins Margarett and Shelly, both of whom worked as aides and in the after-school program at Loleta Elementary School, as happy, outgoing people who would do anything for anyone and light up any room they walked into. Others talked of Metcalf and Margarett Moon’s newfound relationship, noting they’d just become engaged the prior Christmas and the crime left family members planning three funerals when they’d anticipated a wedding.

“You could tell they were soul mates,” wrote Cherri Moon, Margarett’s niece. “They brought out the best in each other.”

“I feel suffocated,” wrote Geraldine June Moon, Margarett’s sister. “It hurts every single day and night.”

In perhaps the most haunting impact statement, Shelly’s younger sister, meanwhile, wrote that Shelly had understood her like no one else and there’s no one in the world she can talk to like she did her mother. She said she’d always felt her life was “so great and wonderful” but on the morning of Feb. 10, 2021, came to realize “there is not a perfect life in the world.” She wrote that she shut down, trying to “sleep (her) sadness away but it did not work.”

“I still see the images of what I saw that morning,” she wrote. “My life is forever changed and I miss my sister and my mom.” l Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal’s news editor. Reach him at 442-1400, extension 321, or thad@northcoastjournal. com. Follow him on Twitter @ thadeusgreenson.

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