The Columbus Dispatch

Teens dreamed of future together before grisly deaths

- By Lindsay Whitehurst

SALT LAKE CITY — They were teenagers in love, bonding after overcoming personal struggles and dreaming of a family and future together. When they vanished days after Christmas, friends and family members combed Utah’s west desert for months in search of answers.

What police eventually discovered was more unspeakabl­e than anyone had imagined: The teens’ bound and stabbed bodies were 100 feet (31 meters) down an abandoned mine shaft.

“We had every scenario run through our heads, but for the events that truly took place, words can’t even describe it,” said Amanda Hunt, after learning the fates of her 17-year-old niece, Brelynne “Breezy” Otteson, and 18-year-old Riley Powell.

A man enraged that his girlfriend had welcomed her friends into their home bound, beat and stabbed Powell to death as Otteson watched in horror before he cut her throat, prosecutor­s said this week.

“It’s as bad as anything I’ve ever seen,” said Utah County Sheriff’s Sgt. Otteson Powell

Spencer Cannon. “They just seem like decent kids ... they never did anything to deserve this.”

Otteson, an outspoken teenager with side-swept hair and bright hazel eyes, had been wrestling for years with her mother’s death in a car crash. But she found something special in Powell, her aunt said. Over Thanksgivi­ng the teen was telling her family she might be pregnant.

“She struggled with that affection, she struggled with feeling that people loved her, and the same with Riley,” Hunt said. “I think they both wanted to be loved.”

Powell had his own challenges. He’d been sent to a boys’ home after bringing a gun to his high school, though Hunt said he only intended to take it rabbit hunting. He changed schools, graduated and found work as a plumber.

The couple was living with Powell’s father in Eureka, a former silver-mining town with a wind-swept main street surrounded by sandy-colored hills pockmarked with hundreds of abandoned mine shafts about 75 miles south of Salt Lake City.

Sturdily built with glasses and a goatee, Powell often played basketball or went riding off-road growing up. At one point, Hunt said he’d briefly dated a woman named Morgan Henderson.

The two remained friends, and made plans to meet at her house and smoke marijuana at around midnight on Dec. 30, police say, after Powell and Otteson wrapped up Christmas celebratio­ns with her family.

Investigat­ors pieced together a scenario of what happened next, according to court documents and statements Henderson gave to authoritie­s:

The couple met Henderson, 34, at a home she was sharing with a 41-year-old boyfriend named Jarrod Baum near Eureka. He’d been in and out of jail since robbing a Burger King at age 15, said Cannon, who booked him into jail back then.

He had warned Henderson against having male friends over, and when he arrived home and found the teenagers there he exploded, she said.

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