Utah Executes Taberon Honie For The Murder Of Girlfriend’s Mother | His Last Meal & Final Words –
I’m not trying to say that the crime didn’t happen. It did happen. I’m not trying to say, “No, this didn’t happen.” It did happen. I’m the one that did those things. I’m the one that took Ms. Benn’s life. Why should you guys spare me? I took Claudia. I don’t have no answer on that one.
That’s the part that I’m on the part about how can I come to ask you guys to spare me when I took her? On August 8th, 2024, at 12:25 in the morning, in the state of Utah, Tab Benn David Honney, after spending 25 years on death row, was executed by lethal injection. He was 48 years old. And in his final moments, he turned toward the window, where he knew his family was watching, and said, “I love you.
” This is not a simple story. It is not a story about a monster, though the crime was monstrous. It is not a story about a broken system, though some would argue the system failed. It is a story about one night in 1998, a family that was shattered by it, and a man who spent two and a half decades waiting for the day the state of Utah would carry out its sentence.
And what makes this case impossible to forget is not just the crime itself. It is everything that surrounded it. The children who were in that house, the family torn between grief and mercy, the last-minute legal battles, the first execution in Utah in over 14 years, and a man, hours before his death, who sat in a cell and chose not to watch movies on a tablet, but instead spent every last hour he had with the people he loved.
So, how did it all lead here? To understand this case, you have to go back to the summer of 1998, Cedar City, Utah, a quiet town, a residential neighborhood, the evening of July 9th. Tab Benn Honney called his ex-girlfriend, a woman named Carol Pikyavit. The two had been in a relationship for roughly 3 years, from 1995 to 1998, and they had a daughter together.
But that relationship had ended. On the phone that night, Honney was not calm. He demanded that Pikyavit come to him. And when she refused, he threatened her, telling her that if she didn’t come, he would harm her family. Pikyavit left for work. She was not home, but her mother was. 49-year-old Claudia Marie Benn was inside the house she shared with her daughter, a house where, that night, three of her grandchildren were also present, including Tab Benn Honney’s young daughter.
Sometime in the early hours of July 10th, Honney shattered the home’s sliding glass door and broke in. Claudia Benn tried to defend herself. She grabbed a kitchen knife. She fought back. It wasn’t enough. What police found when they arrived was a scene they would not forget. Claudia Benn had been attacked with the same knife she had tried to use to protect herself.
Her throat had been slashed four times, deep enough, investigators noted, to reach her backbone. She was 49 years old. She had gone to work that day as a substance abuse counselor, helping others heal from addiction. She was a caregiver, a mother, a grandmother, and she was gone. The three grandchildren inside that home survived, but two of them had blood on them when police arrived.
Tab Benn Honney was 22 years old. And the question that would follow this case for the next 26 years, the question no one could fully answer, was this: How does something like this happen? To understand Tab Benn Honney, you have to understand where he came from. He was born on October 29th, 1975, a member of the Hopi tribe, a Native American community rooted in the American Southwest.
His childhood, by most accounts, was not easy. His attorneys would later describe him as a child who grew up in poverty, a child who experienced multiple head injuries, a child who had his first drink of alcohol at the age of five. Five years old. By the time he was an adult, alcohol had become a central part of his life, not just as a habit, but as something deeply woven into who he had become.
PART 2 :
And on the night of the murder, that fact would sit at the very center of everything. Those who knew him before July of 1998 described a man who was, in many ways, unremarkable in the worst possible sense, not notorious, not violent by reputation, not someone anyone pointed to and said, “I always knew it would come to this.” He had a daughter. He had relationships.
He had a life. And then, on one night, something happened that could not be undone. But to understand why it happened, you have to look at what came out in court. From the very beginning of his legal proceedings, the question of Honney’s mental state on the night of the murder was contested. His defense argued that Honney had been heavily intoxicated, that his state of mind was so severely impaired that his capacity to form intent, to reason, to exercise control was fundamentally compromised.
They pointed to his history of alcohol use dating back to childhood, to the environment he had been raised in, to the head injuries he had sustained. This was not, his attorneys argued, the act of a calculated man. The prosecution saw it differently. The act itself, the phone call, the threats, the deliberate decision to break into the house, suggested planning.
It suggested that whatever Honney’s state of mind was, there was enough awareness, enough intent, to make the choices that led to Claudia Benn’s death. Both arguments were heard. Both were scrutinized. But there was something else that emerged during the legal proceedings, something that made this case even harder to process.
Court testimony revealed that Honney had admitted to molesting one of the grandchildren who was present in the house that night. The children had witnessed something no child should ever witness. And for at least one of them, the nightmare did not end when the violence stopped. That detail, buried in the legal record, but impossible to ignore, added a dimension to this case that no single framing could contain.
And with all of it laid out before them, a jury now had to decide what justice looked like. The trial moved quickly. By 1999, less than a year after the murder, a jury had heard the evidence, weighed the arguments, and reached a verdict. Tab Benn Honney was convicted of aggravated murder. The charges were serious. The evidence was substantial.
And the question before the jury was not only whether Honney had committed the crime, but what the appropriate punishment was for a crime of this nature. The jury chose death. On May 20th, 1999, Tab Benn Honney was formally sentenced to death by the state of Utah. He was 23 years old.
And the legal machinery that would define the next quarter century of his life began to turn. What followed was not silence. It was not resignation. It was 25 years of appeals, legal challenges, and debates about how this man should die, not whether, but how. And that distinction would become one of the most debated aspects of the entire case. 25 years is a long time.
It is long enough for children to grow up, long enough for wounds to refuse to heal, long enough for a man to change or claim to change, and for the world to disagree about whether that matters. Honney spent those years at the Utah State Correctional Facility. He filed appeals. He pursued legal avenues. He was, by all indications, not a passive presence on death row. He engaged.
He reflected. And as the years passed, something in him, at least by his own account, began to shift. Whether that shift was genuine, and whether it was relevant, depended entirely on who you asked. For the family of Claudia Benn, no amount of transformation behind bars could undo what had been done. Her daughter, Carol Pikyavit, the woman Honney had once called to threaten, had lived with the loss of her mother for 26 years.
She wanted the sentence carried out. For Honney’s own daughter, the child he had shared with Pikyavit, the answer was different. She pleaded for her father’s life. The same crime, the same man, two families, two entirely different understandings of what justice required. And then, in 2024, a date was set. But before the execution could happen, there was one more legal battle.
And this one was about the method itself. Utah had originally scheduled Honney’s execution using a new lethal injection protocol, a three-drug cocktail of fentanyl, ketamine, and potassium chloride. This combination was untested in executions. No state had used it before, and Honey’s attorneys filed an emergency appeal arguing that this experimental protocol was prone to causing severe undetected pain.
That on the outside, a person might appear sedated while internally suffering. It was, his lawyers argued, a form of cruel punishment. The debate around lethal injection protocols is not new. It has been at the center of death penalty litigation for years. The question of whether a person can appear peaceful while experiencing suffering is one that medical experts have disagreed on for decades, and courts have struggled with it just as long.
On July 7th, 2024, just weeks before the scheduled execution, Utah officials made a decision. They agreed to switch to pentobarbital, a single drug, a barbiturate, the method that Honey’s own attorneys had suggested as a more humane alternative. It was an unusual outcome, a condemned man’s legal team essentially shaping the method of his own execution, and it raised questions that no one had a clean answer to.
Was this a victory for Honey’s rights? Was it simply a legal formality? Or was it something stranger? A system that, in its final hours, listened to the man it was about to execute. Utah ordered three doses of pentobarbital at a cost of $200,000, though only one dose was initially planned for use. The total cost of the execution, not including legal expenses, exceeded $288,000.
And there was something else. Under a new Utah law, Senate Bill 109, the identities of everyone involved in carrying out the execution were kept secret. The medical team, the correction staff, the executioners, all of it sealed from public record. The state was ready. August 8th, 2024, was confirmed as the date.
Two days before the scheduled execution, Tab Honey appeared before Utah’s Board of Pardons and Parole. This was his final formal opportunity to ask the state to spare his life. He did not deflect. He did not minimize. He did not point to his childhood or his alcoholism or the passage of 25 years as reasons to walk away from the sentence.
Instead, he said this, “Yes, I’m a monster. The only thing that kept me going all these years, the only thing I know 100%, this would never happen if I was in my right mind. I make no excuses.” The board listened, and then they denied the request. The execution would proceed as scheduled. August 7th, 2024, the last full day of Tab Honey’s life.
He woke up inside the Utah State Correctional Facility knowing exactly what the following morning would bring. Prison staff offered him a tablet to watch movies. He never used it. Instead, for nearly 10 hours, he sat in an observation cell separated from his family by a pane of glass, and he talked with them, one pair at a time, for hours.
His mood, staff noted, was calm, gracious even, appreciative. He met with counselors, with a spiritual leader from the Hopi tribe, with attorneys, briefly, formally, though he chose not to spend his visitation time with his legal team. He wanted to be with his family. At around 4:30 in the afternoon, he ate his last meal, a cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake.
But Honey told prison officials something that many in his position do not say. He said he didn’t want that meal to be remembered as his last. He said his real last meal was one he had recently shared with his family. That was the one that mattered. By 8:30 that evening, a deputy warden entered the observation room and told Honey and his family that it was time to begin their final goodbyes.
The room behind the glass would soon be empty, and Honey was moved to prepare for what came next. Both families were present in the witness area that night, the family of Claudia Ben, who had waited 26 years for this moment, and the family of Tab Honey, who had spent just as long dreading it.
The same room, the same glass, two very different kinds of grief. At just after midnight, the process began. August 8th, 2024, 12:04 in the morning, a first dose of pentobarbital was administered. At 12:13 a.m., a second dose followed. At 12:21 a.m., Tab Honey flatlined. Before the drugs were administered, he was given the opportunity to make a final statement. He spoke.
“From a start, it’s been, if it needs to be done for the victims’ families to heal, let’s do this.” He paused. “If they tell you you can’t change, don’t listen to them. To all my brothers and sisters here, continue to change. I love you all. Take care.” He thanked the prison director. He thanked the warden.
He said they had taken care of his family. And then he turned toward the window, toward the place where he knew his family was watching, and said two words, “I love you.” At 12:21 a.m., he was gone. His family was then permitted to enter the execution chamber to perform a spiritual ceremony over his body. At 12:25 a.m.
, the medical examiner officially pronounced Tab Honey dead. He was the first person executed in the state of Utah in over 14 years, since Ronnie Lee Gardner in June of 2010. In the hours and days that followed, reactions were exactly what you might expect, and yet somehow still surprising in their complexity.
For Claudia Ben’s family, the execution represented the closing of a chapter that had stayed open for more than two decades. They had attended every hearing, every appeal, every proceeding. They had waited, and now, finally, there was a kind of stillness that had not been there before. Whether that stillness was peace, that is something only they can answer.
For Honey’s family, the morning of August 8th was a different kind of ending. His daughter, the child born from his relationship with the victim’s daughter, had publicly asked for her father’s life to be spared. She lost that request, and she too was left to find a way forward. The machinery of execution in America is not simple.
It is not cheap, and it is not, by most measures, swift. 25 years is not swift. What it is, what it produces, depends entirely on the framework through which you view it. Claudia Ben went to work on July 9th, 1998, as a substance abuse counselor, a woman whose career was built on the idea that people could heal, that circumstances didn’t have to define outcomes.
She came home to her grandchildren that night. She did not survive the morning. Her family spent 26 years carrying that. Tab Honey spent 25 years in a cell watching those same years pass through a window. Claudia Marie Ben, 49 years old, a mother, a grandmother, a counselor, gone on July 10th, 1998. And Tab Honey, 48 years old, gone on August 8th, 2024.
What you make of everything in between, that part is yours.
