A Utah automotive dealer has taken back the courtesy cars it once provided to Utah State University coaches in an apparent protest of recent firings within the school’s athletic department.

The Murdock Auto Team, co-owned by Ben, Tyson and Blake Murdock, previously provided courtesy vehicles to all Utah State head coaches. Murdock ended its relationship with the USU athletic program after associate athletic directors Jerry Bovee and Amy Crosbie were fired last month.

“I’m very aware of Murdock (Auto Team)’s decision,” Sabau told The Salt Lake Tribune. “We’re super appreciative for all the years of providing courtesy cars for our head coaches. And it’s their business and their decision and we respect that decision. Yeah, it hurts our coaches because now we don’t have cars for them.

“We understand that, and we will come together and we’ll recover from it. It should never be about Diana Sabau. It’s about our student athletes, and it’s about our coaches who work with our student athletes every day. So, I’m hoping that over time maybe we’ll get them back involved and maybe they’ll like the direction that we’re going. This community, this Utah State campus has had crimes of sexual violence for too long. And, to just continue to allow it to happen, I wouldn’t be proud to be associated with that.”

Bovee was fired on July 2 following a Title IX investigation, led by Kansas City-based law firm Husch Blackwell, that concluded that former head coach Blake Anderson, Bovee and director of player personnel and community engagement Austin Albrecht violated reporting policies regarding sexual assault and domestic violence cases. Crosbie was also terminated on July 8 for reasons that have not been made public.

After Sabau, USU President Elizabeth Cantwell and Utah State’s general counsel terminated Crosbie and Bovee, select members of the Logan community have voiced their displeasure about the moves. Last week, former and current student athletes signed a letter addressed to the Utah Board of Higher Education and Utah State University Board of Trustees, asking for an “independent investigation” to be done on behalf of Crosbie and Bovee.

Bovee also recently filed an official grievance against Cantwell and Sabau. He now awaits a decision from a General Grievance Counsel that will then write a letter on their decision and send it to Cantwell, who will either uphold, reject or send it back to the committee for further review.

Jeannine Bennett, who is the chair of the Utah State Foundation, spoke out in support of Sabau and Cantwell following the decisions to fire Crosbie and Bovee. She has been a donor to the university and athletic department and says she’s excited about its future direction.

“It just goes to show that the rules apply equally to everyone, and everybody is held to a high standard at Utah State University, and we have a president who is willing to make that happen regardless of the fallout, because that’s the right thing to do,” Bennett told The Tribune.

Bennett also hopes that Utah State donors who are now hesitant to donate or are pulling funds completely from the university will jump back on board in the future. More particularly, she feels more confident in the direction and the culture of the athletic department despite the pushback Sabau and others have faced from the Cache Valley community.

“I am very hopeful that they see the progress that the university is making, and also still see that there are so many students that still need our support to get their education, and that’s what we need to do as a university,” Bennett said.

“We are taking the appropriate steps to right any wrongs that have happened in the past, and so I’m sorry that we have alumni that have told their support, and I hope that with the more information they gain, that they will change their position.”

A “Blue Zone” is an area where people are known for living to extreme ages such as Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Loma Linda, California; and the entire country of Costa Rica. There is a whole cottage industry of associated books about what those places are doing right lifestyle-wise, generally revolving around good diets and family/community involvement.

Utahns tend to live a long time, too, even though Utah is not typically listed on Blue Zone lists. A child born in Utah has an expected lifespan of 78.6 years, which is the ninth highest in the nation, in between Vermont and Connecticut.

Utah is a varied, diverse place, too, of course, with both highly impoverished communities as well as highly affluent Salt Lake suburbs. This means that a baby born in some areas can expect a much longer life than a baby born in others. These stark differences are reflected in the Census Bureau’s U.S. Small-area Life Expectancy Estimates Project, which calculated the life expectancy of Americans at the census tract level using 2010-2015 data.

Based on this data, the specific area of Utah with the highest life expectancy is rural Duchesne County (Census tract 9406, to be precise), with a life expectancy of 90.4 years, which is higher than any country in the world. That’s also 54th out of the 67,199 census tracts in the U.S. with life expectancy estimates.

That doesn’t mean Duchesne as a whole is higher than every other county, since there are areas of Duchesne that have noticeably lower life expectancy — as well as some suburb areas that are higher too. (A county-level analysis would reach different conclusions, with this one more focused on specific census tracts.)

That being said, there are some patterns evident. When data is cut up this small there is enough statistical fuzziness that Duchesne is in a statistical tie with a number of other long-living areas in Utah — with other “Blue Zones” in the state including rural areas of Garfield and Wayne counties in southern Utah (life expectancy at birth: 89.6 and 89.3 years, respectively). Two North Salt Lake City neighborhoods also stand out, including the area by Emigration Canyon (88.9 years) and the area just north of Ensign Peak (86.9 years).

And what about areas of Utah where people live relatively short (and presumably harder) lives? The lowest life expectancy in Utah is the inner city area by Pioneer Park. Although only a few geographic miles from the “Blue Zone” of North Salt Lake, the life expectancy there is approximately 24 years less, at 66.1 years. Other shorter life expectancy areas include downtown Ogden, with life expectancies in the area between 68.9 and 70.8, and the eastern part of downtown Price, with a life expectancy of 71.3.

Income matters, of course — with North Salt Lake being relatively wealthy. Race seems to matter too, with racial minorities tending to live shorter lives.

On any characteristic where Utah sticks out, of course, people are quick to connect it to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sometimes this is warranted; sometimes it is not. To really parse out a religious effect by county would require more intensive analyses controlling for race and income, which this particular dataset makes difficult.

But there are at least two older studies that have examined Latter-day Saint life expectancy in depth. Using data from 1980 to 2004, two non-Latter-day Saint researchers at UCLA found that “active” California Latter-day Saints had “total death rates that are among the lowest ever reported for a cohort followed 25 years.”

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also had “among the longest life expectancies yet reported in a well-defined U.S. cohort.”

Another study published by a BYU professor using 1994-1998 data compared Utah members with other groups in terms of adjusted life expectancy estimates — finding that although differential tobacco use explains some of the higher life expectancy in Latter-day Saints, it only accounts for about 1.5 years of the 7.3 year difference for males and 1.2 years of the 5.8 year difference for females.

Other factors that appear to be involved include better physical health, better social support and healthier lifestyle behaviors, the study noted, with religious activity also potentially having an “independent protective effect against mortality.”

While these are older studies, the lifestyles, dietary factors and dynamics they have identified as contributing to longer Latter-day Saint lives have not changed. Famously, Loma Linda in California is a “Blue Zone” because of the clean-eating, religiously involved and active Seventh-day Adventist community there, and it is likely that the Latter-day Saint influence similarly has at least something to do with Utahn’s longer life span.

That being said, as shown by downtown Price and other areas where lives are shorter, having Latter-day Saints in your neighborhood doesn’t automatically raise the life span overall. Most of us can clearly do better.

While most Latter-day Saints seem to be good about the prohibitions in the Word of Wisdom — a revelation in one of our books of scripture — there is likely room for improvement among most people in focusing on the positive, good elements of the same standard. For example, Utahns may take a page from Adventist pagebook and eat more fruits and vegetables — and maybe less hamburgers.

While people quibble about this or that dietary principle, the literature on the health benefits of eating eating your fruits and vegetables (or “every herb in the season thereof, and every fruit in the season thereof” as Doctrine & Covenants Section 89 puts it) are non-controversial and indisputable. As soon-to-be-centenarian President Russell M. Nelson has shown us with his own example, we may then receive even more the Doctrine & Covenants Section 89 promises, “the destroying angel shall pass by them, as the children of Israel, and not slay them.”

Utah has all the potential for a bona fide Blue Zone: healthy food, families, outdoor activities, strong communities, and the sense of purpose provided by religion — if Utahns are willing to take advantage of them.

It would be a mistake to boil down these differences exclusively to income or race. And these differences are not simply a matter of lifestyle either — with lower-income people living much shorter lives on average. While people who live in longer-lifespan areas might pat themselves on the back for all the exercise and home-cooked, vegetable-based meals they have the time for, they should be aware that, sometimes a few miles away, there are people who are not so fortunate.

SALT LAKE CITY — On Thursday, one minute after midnight, the state of Utah plans to carry out its first execution by lethal injection in more than two decades.

Looking back at the state’s history dealing with the death penalty, repeal has been attempted several times. Most recently, in 2022. But it’s never had enough legislative support.

Former Republican lawmaker Lowry Snow had a large hand in the 2022 attempt. He made a plea to members of the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee.

“I think there’s a better way to do criminal justice,” he said. “We’re not moving rapidly. We’re not bringing about justice quickly. That’s why I say the system is broken.”

The repeal hearing lasted hours, and families of victims gave tearful testimonies.

“These families who had been promised (a specific outcome) were essentially given, I think, a false promise,” Snow said.

His main argument: a death sentence yields a lengthy court process that leads to decades of appeals and is rarely carried out. However, other views were shared in that hearing which pushed back.

“It’s proportional justice. If you take a life, then you run the risk of losing your own as a result of it,” said Rep. Jeff Burton R-Nephi.

It was his single vote that caused that repeal to fail, after he had a last-minute change of mind.

“I don’t think we should repeal something when we haven’t done everything we can possibly do to improve it,” Burton said.

The improvements he spoke of, he said, included mainly cutting down on the state’s portion of the appeals process. He also argued the death penalty helps prosecutors with leverage.

“To be very forthright with you, I don’t think a lot has been done on this since ’22,” he said. “That ability to offer to remove the death penalty has caused that individual to give the family some relief as to where the remains are.”

Other attempts at repeal were made in 2016 and 2018. While the discussion never moved further than a floor debate, there have been some changes to capital punishment in Utah over the years.

“The big turning point for Utah came in 1992, and that’s when the legislature created a new sentencing option for capital cases,” said Dave Cawley, Cold Podcast host.

Cawley said the new sentencing option brought another option for finality for both victims and prosecutors.

“Life without a chance of parole,” he said

Utah’s current death penalty laws also ban execution for people with intellectual disabilities. In 2007, the murder of a child under the age of 14 became a death-eligible offense.

More recently, Utah also reinstated the firing squad as a backup method of execution if lethal injection was unavailable or was ruled unconstitutional. And as the first execution in 14 years inches closer, Utahns and their elected representatives may not be finished with the debate.

“It becomes an inflection point for all of us to collectively ask,” Cawley said. “‘Is this the way we want our justice system to work?’”