At seven o'clock on the morning of August 3, 1978, people on the street below the International Dunes Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City looked up and saw a woman and seven children on an eleventh-floor balcony. The three oldest children climbed a stack of folded chairs and went over the railing. The woman then began lifting the younger ones and throwing them over, one at a time, while the crowd shouted for her to stop. A bystander, Pat Eyre, told reporters that one child grabbed the railing and fought, and the mother pulled him loose and threw him off. Then she put a foot on the rail, balanced for a moment and jumped.
The woman was Rachel David, thirty-eight, Swedish-born; the name is also recorded as Rachal, and several later reports called her Rebecca, which was the name of her youngest daughter. The dead were Elizabeth, fifteen; Joshua, ten; Deborah, nine; Joseph, eight; David, six; and Rebecca, five. Their sister Rachel, reported as fourteen at the time and as fifteen in later accounts, survived the fall of about a hundred feet with multiple fractures, internal injuries and brain damage, and spent about a year in the hospital.
Three days earlier her husband had killed himself. Bruce David Longo, thirty-nine, a former Mormon missionary excommunicated in 1969, had renamed himself Immanuel David and told a small circle of followers, the Family of David, that he was God. The family had moved from Duchesne, Utah, and for more than a year had lived in a three-room suite at the hotel at ninety-five dollars a day, eating meals sent up from an expensive French restaurant and paying in cash. A follower had just been convicted of federal wire fraud for fund-raising on David's behalf, and the FBI was investigating him on similar charges. Police found him dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in a pickup truck in Emigration Canyon, east of the city. Rachel took the news calmly, telling officers that her husband was ready for the next world, and went back to the suite.
The children had left handwritten notes in the suite expressing their faith in their father's powers. Police Lieutenant Roger Kinnersley said the father had been the absolute authority in the family, and that without him they believed the family would cease to function, so it was very likely they thought they were following him where he had gone. The survivor, Rachel, told a television interviewer in 1993 that she had jumped willingly and still believed her father was God and would return; in 2000 she said she could remember little of it, only that she wanted her family back.
There was no trial, because the only person who could have been charged died in the fall. The deaths were a single act of familicide inside a religious family, not a series. A handful of the Family of David's members kept the faith for decades afterward, in Spokane and near Denver, and cared for the surviving daughter.