After spending nearly all of his adult life in prison for murder, 49-year-old Frank Gene Powell walked out of the Utah State Prison in Draper on Tuesday morning. He was a free man for the first time in nearly 30 years.
Powell could have potentially been in prison for the rest of his life, punishment for running over and killing someone with a truck on Nov. 29, 1987. The slaying came shortly after he and Glen Candland got in an argument about who had the faster pickup truck.
At a Nov. 7 hearing with the Board of Pardons and Parole — his first since 2011 — Powell said a macho attitude, drinking and the feeling of being above the law caused him to get in his truck as a 19-year-old and mow down Candland, 20, at a party in Pleasant Grove.