By Aaron Falk
The Salt Lake Tribune
SALT LAKE CITY — Standing before a judge and Jennifer Schubach’s family Friday morning in 3rd District Court, the 43-year-old Anderson called his girlfriend the “most wonderful person I have ever met.”
“I took a very beautiful person away from this life,” he said.
Judge Kathryn Bernards-Goodman sentenced Anderson to up to 15 years in prison for strangling Schubach last year in Salt Lake City with a chokehold he had learned by watching mixed-martial arts on television.
At trial, Anderson argued that he wanted to calm down Schubach as the couple fought but that he never intended to kill the woman, and left her Marmalade neighborhood home thinking she was still alive.
“Leaving a person that you claimed to love helpless,” Schubach’s aunt, Joi Suliafu said in court, “is beyond callous.”
Anderson and Schubach had been dating since late 2010. Both struggled with substance abuse and their relationship often devolved into fighting.
Both had drugs and alcohol in their system at the time of Schubach’s death, the defense said at trial.
On April 27, 2011, Anderson and Schubach, 39, got into an argument over the woman sewing a button on Anderson’s cousin’s shirt, prosecutors say. Schubach yelled at Anderson.
Anderson put the woman in what he later described to police as a “rear naked choke” -- placing one forearm against her throat, the other on the back of her neck and applying pressure -- to make her quiet, attorneys said.
“Never in a million years did I think I could do something as horrible as I did,” Anderson said Friday. “I’m ashamed and appalled by my behavior.”
Prosecutors charged Anderson with murder, but Anderson’s attorney argued at trial that he never meant to kill the woman. A jury convicted him of a lesser charge: second-degree felony manslaughter.
Suliafu remembered her niece as a loving woman with an infectious laugh, and a single mother who raised two beautiful daughters.
“They’re going to have an awfully big hole to fill,” she said.
The aunt said Schubach often opened her door to people facing difficult times and that her family feared for her safety.
“I think her only fault was that she had too big a heart,” she said.
Anderson said his alcoholism had “ruined my life and so many others.” He apologized to Schubach’s family and promised to stay sober.
“I keep searching inside myself and asking myself if I could forgive someone for doing what I did,” he said. “I have yet to find an answer.”
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