St. George • Mia Bailey, who pleaded guilty and mentally ill to murdering her parents last year, could spend the rest of her life in prison.
Due to the gravity of the murders and at the request of the surviving family members, 5th District Judge Keith Barnes on Friday sentenced Bailey to two consecutive terms of 25 years to life for aggravated murder and up to five years for aggravated assault.
Bailey, 30, stayed silent while her attorney read a statement she wrote.
“It brings me great pain and regret … I was not in a stable mindset at the time, and if only I had gotten help, this would have been preventable,” the statement read. “It makes me want to die because I can’t live with myself. I am sincerely, deeply sorry to my family that I committed this atrocity.”
Before the hearing, Bailey asked the court to be allowed to skip the sentencing, saying that being present could cause her to have a mental breakdown and expressed concern that it could negatively impact her sentencing. The judge denied Bailey’s request.
Utah has indeterminate sentencing, so it will be up to the state’s parole board to ultimately decide how long Bailey spends incarcerated.
Last month, Bailey admitted in plea documents that she “intentionally” shot and killed her parents, Gail and Joseph Bailey, and attempted to shoot her brother in the family’s Washington City home in June 2024. Gail Bailey was 69 and Joseph Bailey was 70.
After shooting her parents, Bailey went downstairs and shot through a closed bedroom door in the direction of her brother. Her brother fled with his wife to a neighbor’s home and called 911 on June 18, 2024, reporting that he believed that his parents had been shot, Washington City police officer Josh Janda said in an affidavit of probable cause for charges. The brother and his wife told officers that they heard his parents “yell at Mia to get out of their home” before they heard gunshots.
According to the affidavit, Bailey then left before police arrived but was spotted and arrested the next day in St. George, and told officers “she had had a falling out with both of her parents and her brother who resided in that home,” Janda said. She said she went to the house “with the intent to kill her parents,” did not feel remorse, and stated, “I would do it again. I hate them,” the affidavit said.
“We lost our parents and we lost our sibling in many ways,” Cory Bailey, Mia Bailey’s brother, told the judge. “Either way, no matter what, we are losing as a family … For me and my family, the [only] choice of justice we can come up with is that Mia is taken care of in state hands for the foreseeable future.”
Ryan Stout, Bailey’s attorney, asked the judge to consider concurrent rather than consecutive sentences, noting Bailey had no prior criminal history, has suffered from autism since age four and has been diagnosed with a number of mental illnesses, including depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia. She is transgender, and had legally changed her name and gender marker, according to court records.
“She deserves to spend decades in prison,” Stout said. “But I recognize what the victims spent their lives recognizing, that Mia’s actions came from a place of severe psychiatric dysfunction, not calculated evil, the combination of her autism, schizophrenia and the hormonal destabilization she was experiencing created a perfect storm.”
Dustin Bailey, another brother of Mia Bailey, acknowledged her mental illness and noted their mother was a mental health advocate who will be dearly missed.
“We miss phone calls that didn’t have an agenda, just checking in,” Dustin Bailey continued. “We miss our mom’s pies that won contests and anchored our holidays, something familiar, expected and uniquely hers. We miss our dad’s steady presence, doing small repairs, keeping things moving and grounding the room without needing to be the center of it.”
“We support consecutive sentences because two lives were taken. Each life deserves to be recognized. That is not negotiable, but we are asking the court to understand that life without the possibility of parole is not justice,” he added.
Dustin Bailey said he believes the crimes were connected, in part, to the effect of “powerful hormones” and other drugs on Bailey. Dustin Bailey said he believes his sister’s care providers did not prescribe treatments responsibly.
“We support LGBTQ rights fully. This has nothing to do with identity,” Dustin Bailey said, explaining his reasoning. ”Providing powerful hormones to a person in a psychiatric crisis without proper psychiatric safeguards is not affirming care. It is reckless. In this case, it acted as an accelerant, intensifying instability, impairing judgment and compounding risk. That failure harmed Mia and it endangered our parents.”
In a separate case, she faces two third-degree felony counts of assault by a prisoner, for allegedly striking one staff member in the face and kicking another in the knee on Oct. 28, 2024, at the Purgatory Correctional Facility.
Aggravated murder charges carry a possible death penalty but the Washington County Attorney’s Office announced early in the prosecution that it would not seek that sentence.