DenverPost.com - Over the edge


To its defenders, Straight Edge is a mostly positive movement centered on the hard-core punk music scene, an outlet for creative, sometimes shy kids who are resisting the glorification of drugs and alcohol.

But the Utah version of Straight Edge is controversial even in an underground subculture that, beginning in the 1980s in Washington, D.C., has grown into an international phenomenon.

In the late 1990s, according to police, members of Straight Edge in the Salt Lake Valley firebombed a McDonald's, a mink- feed cooperative and a leather- supply store, and committed at least one murder, the beating death of a 15-year-old Latino high schooler with a baseball bat.