The Mutant Brady Bunch

By Steve Lopez/Salt Lake City

Things didn't quite work out for Josh Anderson in the Mormon church. Nor did a nondenominational Christian upbringing light the way for Randy Haselton. But neither teen gave up entirely on structure and clean living in Utah. The boys hooked up with Straight Edge, an anti-drug gang of middle-class kids, and discovered new passions. Josh became a vegan and firebombed a McDonald's; Randy enjoys beating the tar out of people.

When the Olympics come to Salt Lake City in 2002, the phrase "Let the Games begin" may take on a whole new meaning. Randy, 19, has been known to wield a samurai sword and says, in the spirit of true sportsmanship, "You know that if you've hit a kid in the head with a bat and he drops, you don't hit him again." Josh, now 20, is probably not the best guy to run through Salt Lake with the Olympic torch. He has no regrets about taking down that McDonald's. He is probably going to cool it from now on, though, he said recently, as he and his fiance prepared to be married by a Mormon bishop.

What next, Amish teens slashing car tires with garden hoes?

Salt Lake City has a problem far more interesting than tornadoes and gold-medal scandals. Some would have you believe that if you bite into a burger or light a cigarette in the Utah capital, you risk being pummeled by one or more of an estimated 50 to 100 Straight Edge kids, and there might not be a more terrifying image than marauding teens who look like the tattooed, mutant kin of the Brady Bunch. The threat, fortunately, turns out to be an exaggeration. But Mormon Elder Alexander Morrison, fearing that Straight Edge could lure teenagers because it shares some philosophies with the church, uses three words to sum up a warning he sent to church leaders: "Steer them clear."

It is unclear how Salt Lake City, of all places, wound up with the most crime-happy crew within Straight Edge, an unstructured international movement of young people, many of them pacifists who don't get high or sleep around and would never dream of calling themselves gang members. Even Utah's nonviolent Straight Edgers, who constitute the vast majority of the state's several hundred members, are clueless as to what went wrong here.

Maybe it's just that in Utah, joining a social order devoted to clean living doesn't exactly distinguish you. Firebombing meat and leather outlets, using pipe bombs on a fur-trading office and setting minks free, however--as Straight Edgers and closely linked animal liberationists have been accused of doing over the past several years--tend to drop you from consideration for membership in the church choir.

It is possible that more light will be shed on the subject next month, when the first of three Straight Edgers goes on trial for the murder last Halloween of Bernardo Repreza Jr., 15, a Hispanic youth. Repreza, whose father moved here from California to get his son away from violence, was attacked with a bat, a knife and police batons. "I don't understand," Bernardo Repreza Sr. says of a bizarro culture in which having a beer is taboo but clubbing someone to death is A-O.K. "It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

Local police say Repreza and some buddies got into an exchange of taunts with kids on the street. Police insist it was neither gang related nor racially motivated, but in the brawl that ensued, Straight Edgers squared off against non-Straight Edgers, and racial slurs were heard.

With the Olympics coming to town, "some people are trying to downplay [the Straight Edge threat]," says James Yapias, a correctional and educational consultant. Others suggest that the group would get more attention if the bad guys were black or Hispanic. Nonsense, say police. Of the 200 gang-related felonies last year in Salt Lake County, only three were by Straight Edgers. They might be the oddest gang, but they're not the baddest. They don't even have guns.

Randy Haselton, who has multiple arrests for fighting, says Edgers won't back down if anyone "talks sh__." But as for cruising around looking to beat people up, he says, "that's a lot of crap."

"Yes, and it's just by coincidence," mocks Salt Lake County sheriff's deputy Brad Harmon, "that if something happens, they've got samurai swords, chains and knives in the trunk."

"I'm not going to say we haven't started fights," Randy admits. "We don't do drugs. We get our rush from fights."

Last year, outside a pizza joint, University of Utah student Mike Orthner says, "I asked a stranger for a light, and he said, 'We don't believe in that.'" Next thing Orthner knew, he was clocked with brass knuckles, and "some wacko" was waving a sword. Assault charges against Randy, who claimed he "didn't hit anybody with it," were dropped for lack of evidence.

For all his willingness to pound his chest, Randy is utterly unable to articulate his political purpose. Josh Anderson at least has a cause. He says he drifted to Straight Edge, and the hard-core, punk rock-like music that is part of the scene, after his mother was ostracized by the Mormon church for coming out as a lesbian. He listened to a band named Earth Crisis, read books on animal liberation and became a vegan. One night in 1996, he and some Straight Edge mates drove by a McDonald's still under construction. "We joked and said it would be neat if we burned it down," he says. And so they did, going in with gasoline cans. "I had a Molotov cocktail. I waited until everyone was out in the car. I threw it and ran."

This was a vegan act and not Straight Edge, says Josh, who has completed probation. Asked why Utah Straight Edgers are prone to violence, he says, "Maybe because this isn't the most exciting town, and a lot of kids need a cause."

But it's not the violent fringe that interests University of Utah assistant professor Theresa Martinez. It's the nonviolent majority. "Thank God someone is coming out and saying we need structure," says Martinez, whose Straight Edge e-mail pals tell of alienation and disillusionment. Ryan Spellecy, 26, a teaching assistant at the University of Utah and a longtime Straight Edger and pacifist, says the organization constitutes a rebellion against a culture that glorifies heroin chic and the idea that you have to smoke or wear Guess? jeans to be cool.

But as gang-force detectives Robin Howell and Troy Siebert pull up to a perfect tract house in suburban Kearns on an assault investigation, imagine the horror of John Lim, a mail carrier who has tried to steer his three sons clear of Straight Edge. The detectives are in Lim's garage now, breaking down his stepson Jesse, 20, with a splendid good-cop, bad-cop routine. Jesse admits throwing a pipe at another kid during a fight at a cemetery, but he downplays the gravity of what police are calling a possible felony assault and swears that he is not a Straight Edger.

"Oh, yes, he is," his father says, emerging from the house. And so are Jesse's two brothers, Lim adds with regret. Jesse, outed as a tough guy, tells all to the cops, a quiver in his throat. If he goes to jail instead of going on the Mormon mission abroad that he's been counting on, Lim says, it's his own fault. "I sure wish I understood what this Straight Edge was all about."