October 2025 | Vol. 34 Iss. 10
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Grieving residents find comfort in new Herriman Cemetery statue inspired by bestselling author By Elisa Eames | e.eames@mycityjournals.com The Angel of Hope from “The Christmas Box” by Richard Paul Evans graces cemeteries all over the country; Herriman is its newest location.
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he dedication of the city’s new Angel of Hope statue, an international symbol of peace and healing, was a tearful yet joyful event. On Aug. 19, city residents and nonresidents alike gathered at the Herriman Cemetery under the slanting sun to acknowledge lost loved ones and find hope and solace through commiserating with others. The first official Angel of Hope statue was not cast in bronze but in ink and was created by a writer rather than a sculptor. In his 1993 novel, “The Christmas Box,” author Richard Paul Evans describes a woman mourning the death of her child while standing at the base of an angel monument in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. Originally, the novel did not include the angel statue. “The book was mostly done, but something was missing,” Evans said. A friend recalled seeing a woman grieve in front of an angel statue at the Salt Lake Cemetery when she was a girl. The snow had quietly drifted down to blanket the bereft woman and the angel. “She told me the story, and I realized this was the missing piece,” Evans said. A story comes to life After the novel gained popularity, grieving parents from around the country began searching for the monument in Salt Lake City. When Evans himself went
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The Angel has the word, “HOPE,” inscribed on her right wing and stands 4 feet, 3 inches tall. (Photo courtesy Herriman City)
to find the statue, it was no longer there. “I asked the sexton, who said there had been some flooding in that area, but no one knows for sure what happened to it,”
he said. To bring the angel to life again, the author commissioned another statue from Salt Lake City-based father-and-son sculp-
tors Ortho and Jared Fairbanks. “It was just a natural course of events. The book was about healing people,” Evans said. “It started as just something for my kids, but once I realized how it was healing people, there needed to be a statue.” “We had two weeks to make the angel—something that would normally take months,” Jared Fairbanks said. “We used my 5-year-old daughter as a model and put the likeness of Richard’s daughter in her face.” The sculptors first made the angel using clay and then cast it in bronze at a Utah County foundry. Matching the description in the novel, the half-inch thick statue is mostly hollow and stands 4 feet, 3 inches tall with a wingspan of 5 feet, 2 inches. The word “HOPE” is subtly etched onto her right wing. “It was an honor to work with my father and daughter,” Jared Fairbanks said. The first Angel of Hope was dedicated on Dec. 6, 1994, to coincide with the date of the death of the child in the story. It would become the first of over 120 Angel statues to dot the nation, with one in Canada and one in Japan. In 1996, Evans created an emergency children’s shelter called The Christmas Box House, which grew into The Christmas Box International, a charity that serves minor and young adult victims of abuse, trafficking and neglect. A mother’s journey When Herriman’s Christa Benward read The Christmas Box over 20 years ago, Continued on Page 4