Episodes

Every Parent’s Nightmare

Episode 1

Sy Snarr understood the words coming out of the Salt Lake police officer’s mouth, but somehow, they just didn’t make sense. “It was just surreal to me, because I just kept thinking … ‘Wake up! This has to be a dream. Wake up,'” she said. “I just kept looking at them, and they said the girl he was with had been shot. She was at the hospital. I’m just like, ‘This can not be happening.’ They…

Read more >

The Survivor

Episode 2

Yvette Rodier willed herself not to move as the man who’d emptied a gun into her body shoved his hand into the pocket of her jeans. She realized she needed to stop screaming and pretend to play dead when the initial burst of gunfire stopped, and she heard him reloading the gun. The 18-year-old fell on her side next to her date, Zach Snarr, as bullets ripped through her side and her leg. After he reloaded,…

Read more >

A Gun and a Death Wish

Episode 3

Tom Watson and his wife had just finished watching the 10 p.m. news the night of August 28, 1996 when the phone rang. They let the call go to their answering machine, but when Tom heard the voice pleading for one of them to answer because he’d “done something so bad”, he told his wife to pick up the receiver. When she did, the man immediately said, “I’ve done something real stupid.”Watson told police his wife…

Read more >

A Death Sentence Waiting to Happen

Episode 4

Sy Snarr tried to focus on her husband’s face and what he was trying to tell her as she fought her way out of a sleepy haze. “I had actually been up for so long,” Snarr said trying to recall the hours after her son was murdered in 1996. “They tell me I was standing there and all of a sudden, I just passed out on the floor. They had put me in bed, and then…

Read more >

Putting Down The Rocks

Episode 5

Grief was like air for Sy Snarr in the weeks and months after she lost her 18-year-old son in a random shooting. The grief very quickly became both a sanctuary and a prison. Even as it suffocated her, it felt like the only place she could exist — a strange in-between place where her anguish seemed to breathe life into her son’s memory. She existed in this place almost everyday after a 19-year-old shot Zachary Snarr…

Read more >

Making Peace With The Shadows

Episode 6

The details of the nightmares aren’t always the same. Sometimes it’s the faces of those killed that change. Sometimes it’s where they die. Occasionally, it’s her who dies — or feels dead — in the dream. But for Yvette Rodier, there is one constant in the nightmares that have plagued her since she survived a shooting 26 years ago. And that is how it feels to be caught, once again, in a violent, random attack. “The…

Read more >

Delivered

Episode 7

As soon as Liane Bell saw her mother’s friend, she felt her anguish. “Real pain,” Bell said, a sob choking her voice. “Real intense pain. And I have questioned since — I don’t know how she moved about, really. I don’t know how she physically was able to leave her apartment and get in our car and go to church after hearing and knowing the intensity, the severity of what had just happened with her son,…

Read more >

Meeting the monster

Episode 8

GUNNISON — Jorge Benvenuto sat alone in a prison cell in central Utah trying to put into words how he felt about killing a stranger when he was 19 years old. He’d wanted to write to the family of Zachary Snarr for many years. He wanted to tell them how sorry he was that he’d shot and killed the 18-year-old at Little Dell Reservoir on Aug. 28, 1996. He wanted to write a letter to Yvette Rodier, the 18-year-old who…

Read more >

The Letter Team