Brother talks about young couple, baby killed in crash

Stephen Curran

Friday, March 18, 2005 | 9:38 a.m.

On the day they and their baby daughter died, Steven and Amber Smith were taking 9-week-old Opal to spend a day amid fields of wildflowers.

For the Cedar City, Utah, couple few things rivaled a day spent hiking and enjoying nature. It was an appreciation they hoped to pass on to Opal, Amber Smith's brother, Lance Miller, remembered Thursday.

On Sunday afternoon, they had been on their way to Death Valley, where the unusually wet weather this year has caused an extraordinarily dense growth of yellow gold, a flower that grows only in the normally desolate expanses of desert. Near the Nye-Clark county line on U.S. 95, however, a 2003 Chevrolet Cavalier crossed the center line and collided head-on with their 2000 Subaru Forester, killing everyone in both cars.

Steven Smith was 31. Amber Smith was 28.

Miller, a Panguitch, Utah, rodeo trainer and Amber Smith's older brother, said she was a tomboy who could "climb like a mountain goat" and whose physical abilities were matched by her intellectual prowess.

A massage therapist and yoga instructor in Brian Head, Amber Smith grew up the middle child of three and maintained a 4.0 grade point average in high school while being named an All-State girls' basketball and volleyball player, Miller said.

As she grew older, Amber Smith's tastes changed, as she traded her basketball shoes and Rodeo Queen title for a yoga mat and a suitcase, traveling throughout Europe and South America, he said.

"We (Lance Miller and younger brother Cache) are both professional rodeo cowboys and we had this little hippie girl," Lance Miller said, laughing. "She was more of a spiritual person, with all the yoga. She was more in touch with auras and stuff. She leaned more toward the hippie love."

It was a type of spirituality and worldliness, unorthodox for rural Utah, that lent itself to more than a little brotherly teasing, he said.

"If there was a pot to be stirred I would stir it," Miller said. "But as much as I stirred it, I did it because I loved her."

The siblings remained close, traveling the 60 miles each way to visit each other at least a dozen times a year, he said.

In Steven Smith, who she married a little more than a year ago, she found a soulmate, Miller said.

"He was the first guy who wasn't weird," he said. "Whenever he'd come to visit I could hear my kids yelling from the next room they were having so much fun."

Friend Pamela Steger met Steven Smith in 1992, while they were both attending Southwest Texas State University. Smith helped establish a recycling center nearby that Steger said still operates.

"This world was a better place for knowing him," she said in an e-mail to the Sun. "I am just sorry I never got to look at his smile when he looked at his new baby girl Opal and his sweet wife Amber."

Steger said she and a group of other friends will be traveling to his funeral next week "in one van, typical Steve style." Miller said a date has not been set for the service.

"I know Steve is looking at us, saying, 'Hold your head up, there's no time to sit around and let your sorrows eat you alive. Get our there and do something,' " Steger wrote.