A family had gathered for dinner at a home outside Billings, Mont., on the evening of Sunday, August 23, 2026, when a man who had been asked weeks earlier to move out of his parents’ house arrived unannounced and fatally shot eight relatives, four of them children, a surviving relative said.
Brad Ireland — who lost his former wife and two of his children in the attack — identified the gunman as 44-year-old Alan Smith. Smith shot his grandmother, his mother and father, his younger sister and the four children, then set the house ablaze and tried to run before law enforcement confronted him in the backyard, Ireland said.
Four adults and four children died inside the home on White Star Circle, investigators confirmed on Tuesday, August 25, along with the suspect, who suffered an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. At a news conference on Wednesday, August 26, interim Yellowstone County Sheriff Kent O’Donnell officially identified the dead as homeowners Dana Smith, 73, and Barbara Smith, 72; Megan Ireland-Ghekiere, 39; Owen Ireland, 13; Chloe Ireland, seven; Landon Ghekiere, 15; Charlotte Ghekiere, 12; and family matriarch Evelyn Smith, 92, who did not live at the home but was there for dinner. The gunman, O’Donnell said, was Alan Michael Smith, 44. No one else is being sought, Billings police said, and the community faces no continued threat.
Three Minutes to a House Full of Smoke
Laying out a minute-by-minute timeline at his August 26 briefing, O’Donnell said Alan Michael Smith arrived in the neighborhood at 5:49 p.m. on August 23. At about 6 p.m., neighbors began hearing what they initially took for fireworks. At 6:02 p.m., by O’Donnell’s account, a female caller phoned 911 from the home on White Star Circle to say people had been hurt, gunfire audible in the back as she spoke. Billings police, briefing two days earlier, put the call at 6:01 p.m. Officers saw Smith in the front yard when they pulled up, and smoke was rising from the residence. The first officer arrived at 6:12 p.m., and by 6:15 the house was engulfed in smoke; flames took hold at the garage minutes later, and the home was fully involved by about 6:44 p.m., when mutual aid was requested.
Smith retreated into the house, and more gunshots were heard, O’Donnell said on August 26. Smith then went out the back door into the backyard, where he was found with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. “It wasn’t known [at the time] that he was actually the suspect of all this,” O’Donnell told reporters.
Once the fire was spotted, it took priority, Billings Police Assistant Chief Shawn Mayo said, because any reasonable attempt to reach the victims was blocked by the flames. Billings Fire Chief Matt Hoppel said his firefighters could not operate as they normally would while the scene remained unconfirmed as secure, and had to work alongside law enforcement, weighing the urgency of the fire against a live threat to responders. Hoppel retired on Thursday, August 27, after more than 22 years with the department, a departure no official has linked to the fire.
Multiple fires were suspected to have been started inside the 4,000-square-foot home, O’Donnell said. Because the subdivision has no city services or hydrants — all houses are on wells — crews “had to haul in truckloads of water, set up a temporary tank and pump out of that tank.”
At about 6:48 p.m., Smith was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was the only person removed from the property alive. The blaze burned until roughly 1 a.m. on Monday, August 24, leaving the house down to its foundation.
Four Generations at One Dinner Table
An online fundraiser was organized by Jennifer Mercer, a neighbor and family friend authorized to release the details. The dead, she said, spanned four generations of one blended family — from a seven-year-old girl to a great-grandmother in her 90s who used a wheelchair.
Killed alongside his ex-wife, Megan Ghekiere, were their two children, 13-year-old Owen Ireland and seven-year-old Chloe Ireland, Ireland said. Also among the dead were 15-year-old Landon Ghekiere and 12-year-old Charlotte Ghekiere, the two children Megan gained through her marriage to her current husband, along with Megan’s parents, Dana and Barb Smith, and Dana’s mother, Evelyn Smith, who lived in a nearby retirement community.
The 911 call came from Charlotte, according to family and friends; the sheriff’s office has described the caller only as a female. “The one thing we do know is that Charlotte was the hero,” Mercer said, adding that the girl tried to save her family and that relatives wanted that known. She described the family as close and loving, and said the parents stayed on good terms after their divorces.
A Father on Shift When the Call Came
Adam Ghekiere, Megan’s husband and an airport rescue firefighter in Billings, was on shift when the department’s communications system carried word of an incident at his in-laws’ address. He called the house. He tried tracking his children’s phones. His wife’s cellphone rang without an answer, and nobody picked up anywhere else either.
Officers held him back when he reached the street, because the scene was still under active shooter status. Word that his wife and children were dead reached him two hours after he arrived. Landon and Charlotte were not supposed to be at the house at all; family dinner was usually on Friday. “I don’t think [Smith] expected my kids to be there,” Ghekiere said. He blamed the killings on a family member’s growing grudge against his in-laws.
Ghekiere has said he never wants to utter the killer’s name in public. He has laid the killings at the feet of a man his wife’s parents had asked to leave more than once, and who kept turning up anyway. “Monster isn’t even enough to describe what he did,” Ghekiere said.
A fundraising page remembered Landon as a caring teenager quick to help family and neighbors, and a patient, protective older brother; Charlotte, relatives said, was funny, precocious and stubborn in just the right measure, a girl on the verge of seventh grade who had lately taken up crocheting and golf. Friends have set up three GoFundMe accounts — one benefiting Adam Ghekiere, one for his ex-wife, Erica Schneider, the mother of Landon and Charlotte, and one for the father of Owen and Chloe.
Warning Signs and a Slow Search of the Rubble
The Smith family came from the Seattle area. After Megan and Ireland divorced six years ago, she moved to Montana with their children and met Adam Ghekiere there, Ireland said; her parents followed, buying a house near their daughter’s. Alan Smith lived with them for years before they asked him to leave a couple of weeks before the shooting.
Ireland, who lives in Arizona, called his former brother-in-law a hermit who passed his days at a computer in his room, and said many people had raised concerns that went unheeded. “There were many red flags and many people spoke out,” Ireland said. “No one listened.” To his knowledge, Smith had never been violent, though he could be verbally abusive. Smith attended Eastern Washington University but struggled to find and keep work, and no arrests or charges turned up in records checks in Montana and Washington.
Investigators believe the killings began as a family disturbance, O’Donnell said on Monday, August 24, asking for patience because the fire and the water used to douse it will slow the recovery of evidence. Jeff Stovall, a spokesperson for the Billings Police Department, said concerns about the structural integrity of the gutted house have complicated the work, and Hoppel said the cause and origin of the fire will be examined once the scene is declared safe. Yellowstone County leads the homicide investigation, joined by Billings police and multiple local, state and federal agencies.
Crews spent days searching the rubble, and by the August 26 news conference all occupants of the house had been accounted for, O’Donnell said, though some remains had yet to be removed because they were part of the crime scene. He also confirmed that Smith had once lived at the house but was not residing there at the time.
Investigators have recovered weapons from the scene but have not described them, and O’Donnell has said his office has “some idea” of what set off the shooting while declining to lay it out, telling reporters that “some of this is the family’s story to tell.” Neighbors have built a makeshift memorial at the subdivision’s mailboxes, where classmates have left teddy bears, flowers and notes.
A City Gathers at Veterans Park
Hundreds gathered at 8 p.m. on Thursday, August 27, for a candlelight vigil at Veterans Park, where family members released balloons in eight colors, one for each person who died. Billings Mayor Mike Nelson had said in a statement two days earlier: “Our community is heartbroken by the tragic loss of life resulting from the horrific events that occurred in Billings this weekend.” He added, “Billings is a strong and caring community, but this week we mourn.” At the vigil he told the crowd that “they call us the Magic City, but you know the true magic of Billings has never been the mighty Yellowstone River or the majestic Rims that ring the city — it’s you. It’s our people.” The radio host Justin Hutchinson opened with a line the family had asked for: “We’re here because they mattered.”
The investigation has been complicated, O’Donnell said on August 28, because there were no surviving witnesses to the shooting. No motive has been made public, the weapons recovered at the scene have still not been described, and no cause has been announced for the fire. The three fundraising pages had drawn more than $200,000 by that day, and organizers said a weeklong community celebration honoring the victims is planned for later in September.
Not everything was lost to the ashes. A deputy sifting through them recovered a family photo album, largely intact, and a family Bible, almost entirely unscathed, O’Donnell said on August 26: “There are rays of good and sunshine that come through this.”