Tucson
I grew up in Tucson. Both of my parents taught at the University of Arizona, and the plan for me was not really in question. Finish the degree, start the PhD, join a faculty somewhere. It was a good plan, made by people who loved me, and I had no argument against it.
My mother became a Quaker when I was born. She has never made a secret of why. She wanted her son to have a claim to conscientious objector status long before anyone would think to ask him for one. That is a particular kind of love, arranged two decades in advance, and I have never resented it for a moment.
I was a freshman at the U of A when Pat Tillman turned down his contract and enlisted. I was a junior when he was killed.
I did not know him. I want to be plain about that, because plenty of people in Arizona have claimed a closeness to Tillman they did not have. I was a student in the same state, watching the same news as everyone else.
I could not get past the arithmetic of it. Here was a man with every reason in the world to stay, who decided that having reasons to stay was not the point. I had been raised to believe that ability is not a possession. It is a debt. Whatever you are handed, you owe back, and you owe it in proportion. I had been handed a great deal. And an exemption had been prepared for me before I could walk.
So I enlisted instead.
What came after
I went in as a military intelligence soldier with the 10th Mountain Division. I commissioned as an infantry officer through Officer Candidate School and served with the 25th Infantry Division. I graduated Ranger School. I deployed to Iraq twice and came home with a Bronze Star Medal and a Combat Infantryman Badge.
Then I went to law school and, in 2012, was named a Pat Tillman Scholar. The foundation does not hand you a career plan. It hands you a standard, which is that you keep finding the place where you are actually useful and you go there, convenient or not.
After law school, I clerked for a federal judge, worked at the Justice Department and as a public defender before serving as a Deputy District Attorney in Salt Lake County, where I built the first dedicated cybercrime prosecution efforts inside that office.
What it costs, and what it doesn't
I am not going to pretend this is a promotion.
This is not a job I need. I have one. It pays better and the hours are kinder. That matters less as a sacrifice than as a fact about incentives: a District Attorney who does not need the office makes different decisions than one who does.
Katie and I talked it through before I filed, more than once and not casually. We decided it was worth doing anyway.
Not for the office. For the same reason I enlisted.
The office is not a prize
Cincinnatus was handed absolute authority over Rome, solved the problem in front of him, resigned it, and went back to his farm. Washington was called the American Cincinnatus for the same reason, because he gave the power back. That is the oldest idea in the republic and I keep returning to it. An office is a duty you pick up and put down. It is not an identity and it is not a rung on anything.
In his Farewell Address, Washington warned that the spirit of party "serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration." He was not describing something that ended in 1796.
Charging decisions are not supposed to have a constituency, and a prosecutor with one eye on the next office will find one anyway. I am running as a Republican in a county that does not often elect them, which should tell you I did not choose this race because it was a safe next step. There was no safe next step. There was a problem.
The gap
I spent four and a half years inside the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office. In December 2025, the Office of the Legislative Auditor General published a performance audit of that office, Report 2025-31. It found the office lacked clearly defined policies to guide prosecutorial discretion. It documented months in which auditors were kept from observing the work they had been sent to review. Not every recommendation it made was accepted.
I read it and I recognized it, because I had seen the conditions underneath it from the inside years before anyone published a word about them.
At some point you stop waiting for whoever is going to fix a thing, and you understand that the waiting is the problem.
How could I be asked and not
When people started asking me to run, I went looking for the reason to say no, and there were good ones. My family. The registration numbers in this county, which anyone can look up.
But I have been here before. I know exactly what it feels like to have an exit prepared for me and to decline it.
The question was never whether this would cost me something. It was whether I was someone who could do the work, and whether I had been asked.
I was asked.
What I am asking
Do not take my characterization of the audit. Read it yourself. Every claim I make about that office is sourced and linked, and you can check any of it in under a minute.