A rodeo bull broke loose from a gate during the Utah County Fair on Thursday night, plowing into Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson’s mother and brother in the parking lot, Henderson said.
Both suffered minor injuries after being “chased, knocked down and stepped on” according to a tweet from Henderson. Police were not alerted, despite the Utah County Sheriff’s Office having several deputies stationed at the fair that night, said Spencer Cannon, a spokesperson with the agency.
The bull was being run in the rodeo, and when it bucked off its rider, it crashed into a corral gate and broke through into the parking lot, fair director Craig Conover said.
“There’s a one in a million chance the gate gets open and the bull gets out,” Conover said.
The situation was resolved “rather quickly,” Cannon said. The bull was loose for about three to four minutes before rodeo staff corralled it again. Cannon’s own personal experience working with the county fair and attending various rodeos has always been positive, he said.
“I know these people,” Cannon said. “They plan well, and their facilities are top-notch.”
However, Henderson said in her tweet that she was not feeling as forgiving.
“I’m pretty pissed,” she wrote.
Just days earlier, on July 29, Henderson shared photos on Twitter of her mother while on a hike, writing, “Meet my cute mom who out-hiked all of us today.”
The rodeo mishap happened nearly a year after Henderson announced that her cousin, Amanda Mayne, had been killed in an apparent murder-suicide in Taylorsville on Aug. 17, 2022. Police believe 34-year-old “Mandy” Mayne was killed by 26-year-old Taylor Martin, a man with whom she had previously been in a relationship, before Martin killed himself. The two had not lived together for more than a year.
Neither had any court protection orders in place against the other, police said, but Martin had been restricted from possessing a firearm.
Months later, in January, Henderson went on to testify in favor of SB117, a bill Utah lawmakers passed this year that required law enforcement officers to conduct a lethality assessment when responding to reports of domestic violence between intimate partners. Mayne’s parents also spoke in favor of the bill, which was sponsored by Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross.
The bill also moved to create a shared law enforcement database of such lethality assessments, so law enforcement officers have access to assessments conducted in different jurisdictions.
“We don’t know if the lethality assessment would have saved Mandy,” Kent Mayne, Mandy’s father, said while testifying, “but it was certainly an opportunity missed for some further intervention that might have saved her, and might have given her the resources that she needed in order to stay safe.”
