Utah Town Unsettled by Doctor’s Suicide and an Inquiry on Indian Artifact Looting; 2nd Suicide is Santa Fe Man

For 30 years Dr. James Redd was always on call to care for the Mormon and American Indian families who share the remote canyon lands here in southeastern Utah. Upon his death on June 11, people found themselves mourning a man who provided not just medicine but a measure of common ground. “I’ve been in his office when it was clear full of Native Americans,” Robert Carroll, who is 77 and a member of the Mormon Church, said after attending an emotional funeral service for Dr. Redd at a Mormon center here last week. “He took everybody.” Yet even as residents of Blanding have joined in grief, the circumstances of Dr. Redd’s death have shocked this tidy little town and threatened the delicate cross-cultural balance here that he helped preserve. Dr. Redd, 60, was found dead of a suicide a day after federal prosecutors charged him, his wife and 22 others with stealing, selling and trading Indian artifacts from the ancestral lands that stretch out from here in every direction. On Friday, a second defendant, Steven L. Shrader of Santa Fe, N.M., was found dead of two self-inflicted gunshot wounds behind an elementary school in DeKalb County, Ill., according to the authorities there. Mr. Shrader, 56, had turned himself in to law enforcement officials in Albuquerque after being served a warrant in the case. The events have resonated deeply here in Blanding, the home of 16 of those charged and the site of a federal raid in the case. Many defendants have surnames — Lyman, Shumway, Redd — that have been prominent here since Mormon pioneers explored the area in the 1880s with plans to bring their education system to Indians. Resentment of the federal government has long run deep among whites and American Indians here, for many reasons, but the arrests have prompted a particularly sharp backlash...NYTimes