Four children were among eight relatives shot dead at a family dinner outside Billings, Mont., on the evening of Sunday, August 23, 2026, killed by a man who had been asked to move out of his parents’ house weeks earlier and who came back unannounced, a surviving relative said.
The gunman was named as Alan Smith, 44, by Brad Ireland, who lost his former wife and two of his children in the attack. Smith shot his grandmother, his mother and father, his younger sister and the four children, then set the house ablaze, Ireland said.
Eight people — four adults and four children — died inside the home on White Star Circle, investigators confirmed on Tuesday, August 25. The suspect died as well, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. No one else is being sought, and the community faces no continued threat, Billings police said.
At a news conference on Wednesday, August 26, Interim Yellowstone County Sheriff Kent O’Donnell publicly identified everyone killed: homeowners Dana Smith, 73, and Barbara Smith, 72; Megan Ireland-Ghekiere, 39; her children Owen Ireland, 13, Chloe Ireland, seven, Landon Ghekiere, 15, and Charlotte Ghekiere, 12; and family matriarch Evelyn Smith, 92, who did not live at the home but was there for dinner. The shooter, O’Donnell said, was 44-year-old Alan Michael Smith.
Three Minutes to a Firestorm
Just after 6 p.m. Sunday, a 911 caller reported an active shooting event. Officers who pulled up heard gunfire cracking behind the house and saw a man standing in the backyard of the already-smoking residence. Three minutes after police arrived, the home was fully engulfed.
The officers who encountered Alan Smith outside watched him retreat back into the house, and more gunshots followed, O’Donnell said on August 26. “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. Suppression could not start until the scene was secure. Multiple fires were suspected to have been set inside the 4,000-square-foot home, O’Donnell said, and because the subdivision — which sits outside city limits and is not required to have fire hydrants — is on wells with no city services, crews “had to haul in truckloads of water, set up a temporary tank, and pump out of that tank.” Every position his crews took up alongside law enforcement was a trade-off, Billings Fire Chief Matt Hoppel said, between how fast the fire needed knocking down and the danger still aimed at the people fighting it.
The blaze burned until roughly 1 a.m. on Monday, August 24, by which point nothing was left of the house but its foundation. Taken into custody and transported to a local hospital around 6:48 p.m., the suspect died there. The victims all died at the scene.
Sifting the ashes, a deputy recovered a family photo album that was “fairly intact,” along with Barbara Smith’s personal Bible, O’Donnell said on August 26. “There are rays of good and sunshine that come through this,” he said.
Four Generations Around One Table
Four generations of a single blended family were lost, the dead ranging from a seven-year-old girl to a great-grandmother in her 90s who used a wheelchair. Those details came from Jennifer Mercer, a neighbor and family friend who organized an online fundraiser and was authorized to release them.
Among the dead were Ireland’s ex-wife, Megan Ghekiere, and the couple’s two children, Owen Ireland, 13, and Chloe Ireland, seven, he said. Megan’s marriage to her current husband had brought her two more children, and they were killed too — Landon Ghekiere, 15, and Charlotte Ghekiere, 12 — as were Megan’s parents, Dana and Barb Smith, along with Dana’s mother, Evelyn Smith, a resident of 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. She described a close and loving family, one whose divorces had not stopped the parents from remaining on good terms.
A Father Working When the Call Came
An airport rescue firefighter in Billings, Adam Ghekiere was on shift when a report of an incident at his in-laws’ address came across the department’s communications system. Megan’s husband tried the house and tried tracking his children’s phones, then called his wife’s cellphone. Nobody picked up.
Officers held him back when he reached the street, where active shooter status was still in effect. He arrived, and it was two hours before he learned his wife and children were dead. Neither Landon nor Charlotte was supposed to be at the house at all — family dinner normally fell on a Friday. “I don’t think the shooter expected my kids to be there,” Ghekiere said. He blamed the killings on a family member’s growing grudge against his in-laws.
On a fundraising page, Landon was remembered as a caring teenager who was quick to help family and neighbors, while Charlotte was recalled as a girl about to start seventh grade who loved posing for photos. Two GoFundMe accounts have been set up by friends, one of them benefiting Adam Ghekiere and the other his ex-wife, Erica Schneider.
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 made the move afterward and bought a house close to their daughter’s. For years Alan Smith lived under their roof, until they told him to go a couple of weeks before the shooting.
Speaking from Arizona, where he lives, Ireland called his former brother-in-law a hermit whose days were spent in his room on a computer, and said the concerns many people had raised went unheeded. Violence was not something he knew Smith to have committed, although verbal abuse was within his range. Work was hard for Smith to find and harder to keep after he attended Eastern Washington University, and no arrests or charges turned up against him in records checks in Montana and Washington.
Adam Ghekiere told The U.S. Sun of Alan Smith: “He was like a hermit. Megan’s parents wanted him to move out a few times but he just kept on sticking around.” He added, “It got to the point where his mom didn’t enjoy living in her own house with how he was acting towards them.”
Investigators believe the killings began as a family disturbance, O’Donnell said on Monday, August 24. Recovery of evidence will be slowed by the fire and by the water used to douse it, he noted, asking for patience. The work has also been complicated by concerns about the structural integrity of the gutted house, said Jeff Stovall, a spokesperson for the Billings Police Department, while Hoppel said the fire’s cause and origin will be examined once the scene is declared safe. Leading the homicide investigation is Yellowstone County, joined by Billings police and multiple local, state and federal agencies.
As of Thursday, August 27, crews had finished searching the rubble and all occupants who were inside the house were accounted for, O’Donnell said. He called it “an ongoing criminal investigation with eight victims, making this very complex.”