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Fourteen years later, not one of Yvette Rodier's senses has forgotten the murder of Zach Snarr.
There was the taste of pizza on a first date. The brightness of the moon. The metallic smell of gun smoke. The sound of bullets being reloaded. The hotness of the killer's breath on her face while she played dead.
But that's just background, Rodier told an audience of victims' advocates at a conference Wednesday at the Salt Lake City Hilton. The story leading up to Snarr's death belongs to thrill-killer Jorge Martin Benvenuto, who told police he shot the 18-year-olds because he "wanted to see what it was like to shoot someone."
"When he left, that's where my and Zach's story really begins," Rodier said. Rodier, now an attorney for the Utah Crime Victims Legal Clinic, helped coordinate the National Organization for Victim Assistance annual conference this week.
With multiple gunshot wounds, Rodier dragged herself up a slope from Little Dell Reservoir, where she and Snarr — longtime friends on their first "official" date — had gone Aug. 28, 1996, to take pictures of the moon's reflection. As she clawed her way up the mountain to the highway, blood streamed into her eyes and she slipped back downhill.
"I just knew I had to get to the top of that mountain," Rodier said. Snarr's body was lifeless on the ground below, but Rodier says she has just one explanation for how she reached the road.
"I know that Zach made sure I got to the top that night," she said.
Rescuers found Rodier at the top of Emigration Canyon and flew her to a hospital. A medic told her, "It's a beautiful night. Let's just enjoy this helicopter ride."
It was a chance "just to be still, just be who I was for one last time," Rodier said, choking up. "Everything changed after that. … I'm afraid of the dark. I hate the full moon. I miss Zach every moment, and I want to make Zach proud."
Snarr's mother says the memory of her son is especially painful now — the anniversary week of his death.
"Now I am a member of this sad, terrible club," Sy Snarr said Wednesday.
She recalled the rage she felt when she learned that, after firing several fatal shots, Benvenuto held the gun to her son's head and fired again for good measure.
"I think of that beautiful boy and that beautiful face and what happened to him — it breaks my heart," she said tearfully. "That cancer-like emotion consumed me. I became an angry, bitter person. I knew I had to change."
Victims' advocates, through prosecutors' offices and police departments, provide the help survivors need to move on, Sy Snarr said.
She said they also helped her through Benvenuto's many appeals, most recently in 2007. By protecting his rights as a defendant, Sy Snarr said, the courts have ensured his guilty pleas to aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder cannot be overturned.
"At the time, [I asked], 'Why was the murderer being coddled by the justice system?' " Sy Snarr said. "We would learn to be grateful."