Mitchell was odd, familiar figure downtown

Deseret, Mar. 13, 2003
http://www.desnews.com/
By James Thalman and Elaine Jarvik, Deseret News staff writers

      The street preacher known as Emmanuel was seen all over the place until people started looking for him.

      Biblical-looking in his long robes and beard, he was a familiar downtown figure, carrying a staff as he preached and panhandled.

      Now, Emmanuel, also known as LDS Church). But something happened, and I don’t know what. They quit going to church.” A dozen years ago, Mitchell began having “revelations,” eventually changing his name to Emmanuel, Hebrew for “God is here.”

      Derrick Thompson said his stepfather told him he had taken “10 hits of LSD and talked to God out in the desert” several years ago. “They said they weren’t on drugs, but we think that was a lie. We think that’s how he could communicate with God. That and listen to the Steve Miller Band.”

      The Mitchells also got involved in “patriot” groups opposed to paying income taxes, and later became followers of survivalist guru Bo Gritz, according to Corbett. “Then all of a sudden they decided to buy a fifth-wheel trailer and they went up to Idaho where this Bo Gritz was.”

      When they didn’t get along with Gritz and his other followers they left Idaho, sold the fifth-wheel, sold all their worldly possessions, “and went off across the United States” as vagrants.

      “She sent me one card in two years,” Corbett said.

      According to Derrick Thompson, their mother “disowned” them about five years ago. “He’s such a wack job,” said Thompson about his stepfather. “He obviously brainwashed my mom.” Now, he said, “she’s going to go down with him.”

      Mitchell believed he was “above God,” Thompson said. “They were always talking about the Lord directing them,” Corbett said.

      Eventually Emmanuel wrote his version of the Book of Mormon.

      Utah County naturopath C. Samuel West, who says he has known Mitchell since the mid-1990s, “started going off the deep end. . . . I was trying to get him back in church, and that’s when he left me.”

      Derrick Thompson just happened to be watching “America’s Most Wanted” — a show he hadn’t turned on in a year, he said — the night it showed the composite drawing released by the Smart family and named Brian David Mitchell. The Thompson brothers contacted the show and provided them with pictures of their stepfather, including one that showed him clean-shaven.

      Mitchell, they said, liked to preach at the depot, and often traveled by bus.

      Mark Thompson said he couldn’t speculate why Smart might have gone with his stepfather that night in June.

      “But he was fully capable of putting a gun to her head. He was into guns, and we went shooting several times as kids.”

      Last summer, a Deseret News staff member came upon him one afternoon trying to tear down the “Kidnapped!” poster of Elizabeth that was on display in the paper’s first-floor windows.

      When the staffer told him to stop, Mitchell told her that “they found the guy.” The staffer said she ran from floor to floor trying to get her colleagues to come talk to the man, but no one was interested. At the time, Brian David Mitchell was dismissed as just another eccentric drifter.

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