Suspect found outside home with self-inflicted wound died at hospital
Multiple people — including children — were killed Sunday evening in a shooting at a home in Billings’s west end area that was also set ablaze, according to authorities.
An officer responded to a call reporting a shooter at a home at about 6 p.m., the Billings Police Department said. The officer heard gunshots fired from the back of the house upon arriving and then saw the home fully engulfed in flames, police said.
The suspect in the case was found outside the home with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was taken to a hospital, where he later died, police said.
As of Tuesday morning, officials had not disclosed how many victims had died, their ages, or their identities — beyond saying that there were “multiple, including children.” An online fundraiser for two victims identified as minors, cited by multiple media outlets, maintained that eight people were killed.
Yellowstone County Sheriff Kent O’Donnell told a news conference Monday that all victims targeted in the shooting were dead, with “multiple adults and multiple juveniles” killed. O’Donnell said the victims have been identified, but the number of those killed, their names, and their ages would not be released immediately. He had met with family members “from both sides of this,” he told KULR.
The case has been characterized by police as a family disturbance, according to KULR.
Firefighters dispatched to the scene had to wait until officers secured the area — and they also may have faced water access issues, officials said. “The delay in limited access presented significant challenges, fire conditions continued to worsen and the residents ultimately became … consumed by fire,” Hoppel, the Billings fire chief, said at Monday’s news conference.
O’Donnell added that the fire and the water used to suppress it would slow the investigation of the crime scene and recovery of evidence. “So we ask for patience as we complete this investigation,” he said.
Details about a motive were not immediately released, nor was an explanation for how the fire was started. Authorities asked the public to avoid the scene as investigators continued to collect evidence, and they expected to provide another update Wednesday.
A statement from Billings Police Sgt. Jeff Stovall extended condolences “to everyone affected by this awful tragedy” while adding that authorities were intentionally limiting details about the case “to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.”
The Billings killings came days after five people were killed in rural Forest Grove, Oregon, by a man who then apparently died by suicide, according to authorities. Authorities on Tuesday identified the Oregon victims as Mary Elizabeth Kimsey, 85; Rowan Karla Kimsey, 60; Stella Jade Kimsey, 26; Linsey Mae Haraldsen, 26; and Alvin Raymond Chu, 27, according to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. Their suspected killer was Benjamin C Parker, 36, who was the partner of Stella Kimsey, officials said. Rowan and Mary Kimsey were Stella’s mother and grandmother.
The killings in Oregon pushed the number of mass murders in the US for the year so far to at least 16, according to information from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonpartisan resource. If the number of victims in the Montana case is verified, that number would increase to 17, with five mass murders occurring in August alone.
The archive defines a mass murder as cases in which four or more victims are killed.
A substantial number of mass murders in the US fit the definition of a crime known as a family annihilation — killings of multiple close family members, most commonly by an armed male. US communities have historically perceived family annihilations in isolation, but a July 2023 Indianapolis Star investigation found they were occurring across the US every five days on average and raised questions about why the country has not sought a nationwide strategy to mitigate the frequency of that particular type of crime.