Eight relatives were shot dead as a family gathered for dinner at a home outside Billings, Mont., on the evening of Sunday, August 23, 2026, and four of them were children. The gunman had been asked to move out of his parents’ house weeks earlier and returned unannounced, a surviving relative said.
The shooter was 44-year-old Alan Smith, according to Brad Ireland, whose former wife and two of his children were among the dead. Ireland said the victims were Smith’s grandmother, his mother and father, his younger sister and the four children. After the shootings, Smith 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: 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. O’Donnell named the gunman as Alan Michael Smith, 44. No one else is being sought and the community faces no continued threat, Billings police said.
Three Minutes to a Firestorm
Just after 6 p.m. on Sunday, a 911 call reported an active shooting event. Gunfire was cracking from behind the house when officers pulled up, and they saw a man standing in the backyard of the residence, which was already smoking. More shots followed. The home was fully engulfed three minutes after police arrived.
Officers encountered Alan Michael Smith outside, but he retreated back into the house and more gunshots were heard, O’Donnell said on August 26. Officers then found him at the back of the house with an apparent self-inflicted wound. “It wasn’t known [at the time] that he was actually the suspect of all this,” he said.
Once the fire was spotted it took priority, Billings Police Assistant Chief Shawn Mayo said, because the flames blocked any reasonable attempt to reach the victims. Securing the scene had to come first before suppression could start, and no fire hydrants are required in the subdivision, which sits outside city limits. Positions that weighed the urgency of the fire against a live threat to responders were where his firefighters had to work alongside law enforcement, said Billings Fire Chief Matt Hoppel.
Multiple fires were suspected to have been set inside the 4,000-square-foot home, O’Donnell said. Because the subdivision has no city services and all the houses are on wells, crews “had to haul in truckloads of water, set up a temporary tank, and pump out of that tank.”
The blaze burned until roughly 1 a.m. on Monday, August 24, and by then the house was down to its foundation. Around 6:48 p.m., the suspect was taken into custody and transported to a local hospital, where he died. Every one of the victims died at the scene.
Four Generations Around One Table
Four generations of one blended family were lost in the space of an evening, the details released by Jennifer Mercer, a neighbor and family friend who organized an online fundraiser and was authorized to share them. The dead ranged from a seven-year-old girl to a great-grandmother in her 90s who used a wheelchair.
Among the dead were his ex-wife, Megan Ghekiere, and the couple’s two children, 13-year-old Owen Ireland and seven-year-old Chloe Ireland, Ireland said. Killed too were the two children Megan gained through her marriage to her current husband — 15-year-old Landon Ghekiere and 12-year-old Charlotte Ghekiere — plus 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. “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. The family was close and loving, Mercer said, and the parents stayed on good terms after their divorces.
A Father Working When the Call Came
Adam Ghekiere, an airport rescue firefighter in Billings and Megan’s husband, was at work when the department’s communications system carried word of an incident at the address of his in-laws. Calls to the house went unanswered. He tried tracking his children’s phones. He called his wife’s cellphone. Nobody picked up.
Active shooter status was still in effect at the scene, so officers held him back when he reached the street. Two hours passed after his arrival before he learned his wife and children were dead. Family dinner was usually on Friday, and Landon and Charlotte were not supposed to be there. “I don’t think the shooter expected my kids to be there,” Ghekiere said. A family member’s growing grudge against his in-laws was, in his view, what lay behind the killings.
On a fundraising page, Landon was remembered as a caring teenager who was quick to help family and neighbors, while Charlotte was described as a girl on the verge of seventh grade who loved posing for photos. Friends have set up two GoFundMe accounts, one benefiting Adam Ghekiere and another for Erica Schneider, his ex-wife.
Red Flags and a Slow Investigation
The Seattle area is where the Smith family came from. After the couple divorced six years ago, Megan 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, until they asked him to leave a couple of weeks before the shooting.
Ireland, who lives in Arizona, said his former brother-in-law was a hermit who spent his days in his room on a computer, and that many people had raised concerns that went unheeded. Smith had never been violent to his knowledge, though he could be verbally abusive. Steady work eluded him after he attended Eastern Washington University, and no arrests or charges against him turned up in records checks in Montana and Washington.
Adam Ghekiere told The U.S. Sun: “He was like a hermit… Megan’s parents wanted him to move out a few times but he just kept on sticking around. It got to the point where his mom didn’t enjoy living in her own house with how he was acting towards them.”
Sifting the ashes, a deputy recovered a “fairly intact” family photo album and Barbara Smith’s personal Bible, O’Donnell told reporters on August 26. “There are rays of good and sunshine that come through this,” he said.
Investigators believe the killings began as a family disturbance, O’Donnell said on Monday, August 24, asking for patience and noting that the fire and the water used to douse it will slow the recovery of evidence. “This is an ongoing criminal investigation with eight victims, making this very complex,” he said on August 26, when he also confirmed that Alan Smith had once lived at the house but was not residing there when the killings occurred.
Concerns about the structural integrity of the gutted house have complicated the work, said Jeff Stovall, a spokesperson for the Billings Police Department. An examination of the fire’s cause and origin will follow once the scene is declared safe, Hoppel said. The homicide investigation is being led by Yellowstone County with Billings police and multiple local, state and federal agencies.
As of Thursday, August 27, after days of searching the rubble, all the occupants who were inside the house have been accounted for, O’Donnell said.
