Eclectic, loving: Parents remember daughter Eden Mariah Montang, killed in June 2 shooting
Eden Mariah Montang was passionate about making plans.
When she was a 16-year-old junior at Boone High School, she asked her parents for a whiteboard for her birthday.
“I said, ‘Sweetie, are you sure that’s all you want?’” her father Terry Montang recalls.
He went to a big box store, bought a whiteboard and presented it to her.
“She said, ‘Oh Dad, no. I want a whiteboard like they have in classrooms,’” Terry said.
He told her it would take up the whole wall and would require grommets and screws in the drywall.
“She said it was just what she wanted, so the two of us put it up there together. Within a couple weeks, she had it completely full. She had mapped out her life,” he said.
A year later, she came home from school frustrated and said her whole plan had been ruined. So she started over.
“She was resilient. After that happened, she came up with another plan,” Mia said.
She was resilient but she was also adamant about the things she wanted. For example, she petitioned Boone High to let her take college credit courses at Iowa State in American Sign Language (ASL) when to that point only Des Moines Area Community College classes were allowed.
More: What we know about Cornerstone Church shooting victim Eden Montang
Terry and Mia are both ASL interpreters. They started signing early teaching it to their older children, Elyse and Ethan.
“We started at birth with Eden. She was an angelic child because there were no terrible 2s. She had a complete vocabulary and could tell us what she wanted through sign language,” Mia said. “And so she wanted to be an interpreter.”
Eden contacted an ASL instructor at Iowa State and tested out of the entry level class. She made such an impression on her professor that, as a junior in high school, Eden was the teacher’s assistant at the Iowa State University deaf program class.
“When the professor was gone, Eden would actually teach the class,” Mia said.
Eden was also hired during high school to teach ASL to the staff at Mainstream Living in Ames, a community-based service for people with disabilities.
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Eden Mariah Montang was a 'spirited wind'
Quirky, upbeat, energetic, eclectic, loving, steadfast. Those are a few of the words Mia and Terry Montang use to describe their daughter Eden Mariah Montang, who was killed June 2 outside Cornerstone Church in Ames. The Montangs reminisced about their daughter with the Ames Tribune on Thursday.
Mia calls her daughter Eden. Terry calls her Mariah, which is a Native American word meaning “spirited wind.”
On her quirky and eclectic side, Eden had a collection of eyeglasses — assorted colors and styles she used to match her outfits and her moods.
Like other things in her life, she was thrifty about those glasses, ordering them from a website she discovered, where they cost about $5 a pair.
Eden also had a diverse collection of coffee cups.
“None of them matched. They were from all over the world, wherever she’d traveled,” Mia said.
Terry Montang’s military career took the family overseas, and Eden had traveled to every European country, Taiwan, Mexico and Canada.
“Her clothing was another eclectic thing about Eden. She didn’t feel like she had to fit in — she just expressed who she was,” Mia said.
“That was part of her thriftiness to. She shopped a lot of Goodwill, Salvation Army, The Loft in Ames,” Terry said. “She would always surprise me with something different.”
Eden wasn’t afraid to get dirty and do hard work. She had recently helped her parents build a deck, and she was there in her work boots with her tool belt, hammer and drill.
And she also loved to glam up and go out.
“She could bale hay, shoot a gun, do chores and then go out that night for a nice meal and know how to appropriately sit at a table and have a conversation and know which fork to use,” Mia said.
More: Father of Ames shooting victim Eden Montang says 'good gun laws' shouldn't take away freedoms
Eden was an accomplished dancer, beginning as a young girl dancing on her daddy’s feet. She could waltz, two step, foxtrot, swing. She took ballet and tap lessons as a little girl, but her Mom and Dad taught her the ballroom steps.
Eden was an avid reader, writer and passionate follower of the Lord
“Mariah was also an avid reader, and she could retreat inside herself. She could inhale a novel in a weekend,” Terry said.
She was a prolific and talented writer as well, Mia said. Eden got involved in fan fiction, especially in the superhero genre, and had written many stories since she was about 11 years old.
“There was a lot of giftedness in her writing. And all that got deleted off her Google Drive,” Mia said. “Vengeance is not nice.”
The deletion of the files was one of the unkind acts Eden was the recipient of during her relationship with Johnathan Lee Whitlatch, 33, the man who killed himself after he shot and killed Eden and one of her best friends, Vivian Flores, last month.
“She supported him right up until the point where the Lord said enough is enough,” Terry said.
Eden had attended a youth conference where Terry said she had received clear guidance that he was not her person.
“Her walk with the Lord really started growing after graduation and took off a few years ago,” Terry said.
Eden was raised in a Christian home and always had that foundation. When she became involved with Salt Company, a college-age Bible study group at Cornerstone Church in Ames, her faith increased.
“She skyrocketed. It was like a rubber band being propelled,” Mia said.
“Salt Company was her saving grace. Mariah had prayed for a long time to have Christian friends — friends who were believers she could actually relate to,” Terry said. “She would come home smiling and laughing, telling us about her new friends.”
Those friends, especially the other young women in Eden’s small group within Salt Company, became an important part of Eden’s life and were welcomed many times at the Montangs’ home. The small group, also known as a C Group or Communication Group, solidified Eden’s connection to the Lord and to her friends, Mia said.
Shortly before her death, Eden was also named a member of a D Group, or Disciple Group. D Groups lead the C Groups and also meet together to foster their leadership.
“Eden and Vivian had such a deep faith. Even what Satan has meant for darkness, God’s light will shine through. When a room is filled with complete darkness, even if it’s a little bitty flashlight, that light will penetrate that darkness,” Mia said.
Eden Mariah was a 'tremendous planner'
Terry was surprised when Eden decided to join the Iowa National Guard.
“Mariah was a tremendous planner,” he said. “She wanted to do this so she could pay for college, and she had a whole plan she laid out so she wouldn’t have college debt.”
She was so adamant about paying for college, she decided to become a massage therapist so she could make money that way during college too. She went to New Mexico, where she trained and received her massage license, then was hired by Massage Heights in Ames, where her colleagues knew her as an optimistic, kind coworker.
Eden also pet-sat for dogs, cats, horses and goats, with many clients in a 60-mile radius, and she also worked for her family’s real estate business.
“Mariah wanted to stay in Iowa. In fact, she wanted to live on our farm, that’s been her home since 2010,” Terry said. “She wanted her own family and wanted to be able to pay her own way in life.”
Eden was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as her parents worked at the Milton Hershey School. There were 10 to 13 children who lived with the Montang family at the school, so Eden was raised in a multiage, multicultural home.
“So acceptance of other people was never an issue for her,” Mia said. “I think she saw the passion we had to serve others and assist, motivate and encourage — and she bit off on that.”
When Eden was in early elementary school, the Montangs twice lived in Germany, which gave Eden and her siblings an international experience.
In 2010, the family moved to their 10-acre farm near Boone. There was a lot of hard work to do there — clearing, cleaning, burning, building. Mia began a cleaning business and Eden helped with that.
One of Mia’s strategies as a mom has been to plan silly games for her family as well as her kids with their friend groups.
It started when the kids were young and the family would play games on camping trips, weekends and holidays. It continued through Eden’s 22nd birthday in February. Vivian Flores and her twin sister Valarie Flores, both of whom were in Eden’s C Group and among her closest friends, were at Montangs’ and played a game that had them all giggling.
Standing in the living room with little presents at their feet, Mia would call out body parts — shoulders, knees, toes, head. The girls would move their hands from their shoulders to their knees and so on until Mia would call out "gift." Then the first one to grab their gift won the contents.
“The games don’t cost much, but they make great memories,” Mia said, fighting back tears. “I think mamas have a really big job and that’s to be memory makers.”
Eden looked forward to getting married and having a family. She wanted several children — at least one biological child, but she also wanted to foster children with disabilities.
“She wanted to be able to adopt four, five, six deaf kids. Or children with other disabilities,” Mia said.
“We have to remember God’s plans are better than our plans, even though they’re not our plans,” Mia added through tears. “Because this is not what I planned. I want to hold her hand. I want to go shopping and find bargains along the side of the road. I want to hold her babies. I want Terry to walk her down the aisle. Our hearts are breaking and our pain is real, but I know she’s embracing her new heavenly home.”
This article originally appeared on Ames Tribune: Eden Mariah Montang had many plans for her life but it was cut short
