“I have no doubt that he would still be with us if [Utah Adult Probation & Parole] would have done their job,” Bartschi’s daughter said Monday.

“The government, the corrections department, its agencies and its divisions allowed violent people to be paroled that should never have been paroled,” Sykes said.

As a result of these early paroles and lack of proper monitoring, the law firm says that these offenders were given the opportunity to run free and do whatever they’d like.

But according to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit and their attorney Robert Sykes, since 2018, the Utah State Prison has “released multiple individuals under the direction of the JRI program who should not have been released because of the ‘risk or a threat to the community.’ These individuals were violent offenders who did not qualify for this program, or committed offenses for which their parole should have been terminated.”

“A complaint against the state of Utah was issued today by the Sykes McAllister Law Offices claiming that the state and various correctional facilities have inappropriately released violent offenders and then failed to monitor them, thus resulting in tragic consequences.”

"The state has known that there's big deficiencies in what they've been doing for years and not done anything to correct it," says Pete Sorensen, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs.

"We're here because of a government cover-up. The cover up was such that corrections leaders threatened their own people," attorney Bob Sykes told a room full of members of the media and victim's family members during a news conference announcing the civil lawsuit against AP&P, the Utah Department of Corrections and the Board of Pardons and Parole.

“There were several murders as a result of this,” Sykes explained. “Many injuries, a fire, brutal beatings took place.”