One year later: The Owl Bar mass shooting, the manhunt, and the lasting effect on Anaconda

ANACONDA — David Gwerder entered the Owl Bar not long ago on his 67th birthday and thought suddenly of the bartender and three customers shot to death there one year ago.

“I walked in thinking about four people who didn’t get to see another year," he said. "And I did."    

Gwerder has owned the Owl Bar on East Third Street in Anaconda for about 30 years. The bar made national news after bartender Nancy Lauretta Kelley, 64, and customers Tony Wayne Palm, 74, Daniel Edwin Baillie, 59, and David A. Leach, 70, were shot and killed on the morning of Aug. 1 by a man authorities identified as Michael Paul Brown, then 45.

Now, at the one-year anniversary of an event that rocked Anaconda and the state, the Owl Bar plans to mark the day with a tribute to the shooting victims.

“The Day of Remembrance” will include the unveiling around noon of a memorial plaque bearing their names.

Brown lived next door to the bar. He fled soon after the shooting in a stolen Ford F-150 pickup, authorities said. He abandoned the truck with police in pursuit and vanished into the thickets, deadfall and standing timber of the Garrity Mountain Wildlife Management Area west of Anaconda. He hid out there for nearly a week as an intense search by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies unfolded.

An automated road sign on Montana Highway 1 west of Anaconda that typically displayed warnings about potential wildlife collisions flashed “Active Man Hunt.” A hand-lettered sign on the nearby Ranch Bar read, “Closed Active Shooter on the Loose.”

Law enforcement personnel from 25 Montana counties, from seven Montana cities, from four state agencies and eight federal agencies participated in the manhunt.

The federal agencies included the FBI, ATF, DEA and the U.S. Marshals Service.

During a telephone interview Monday, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen acknowledged that the scope of the manhunt and the cooperation of so many agencies were likely unprecedented in the state.

“It really is a testament to Montana and our law enforcement agencies,” Knudsen said.

He said the search, which included officers, helicopters, drones, dogs and infrared was challenging, especially recognizing that Brown could be armed and was at home in the terrain.

“He knew that country really well,” Knudsen said.

Anaconda-Deer Lodge County remained on edge during Brown’s time on the lam. Carmel’s Sports Bar & Grill, a few blocks up 3rd Street from the Owl Bar, required patrons to knock on a locked door to gain entry.

(Roughly 10 months later, one of Carmel’s owners, Shane Charles, was shot and killed at the bar. A customer from the neighborhood, Mark Ray Lock, 61, has been charged with deliberate homicide.)

Anaconda outdoorsmen who knew the area into which Brown fled described it as rife with thickets, downed timber and places to hide. Hearst and Haggin lakes and other water sources were in those foothills of Mt. Haggin.

“He has the advantage over people looking for him,” said Chris Marchion, an Anaconda native and inductee into the Montana Outdoor Hall of Fame.

Authorities involved in the search had to assume Brown was armed.

Finally, a big push by law enforcement on the morning of Aug. 7, followed by a cold and drenching thunderstorm, apparently flushed Brown out of the woods and across Warm Springs Creek. He took refuge on private property about 5 miles west of Anaconda off Montana Highway 1.

A tip from the owner of the property, who had encountered Brown face-to-face but wasn’t harmed, led to a raid around 2 p.m. on Aug. 8. Brown was arrested without incident and subsequently charged in Anaconda-Deer Lodge County District Court with four counts of deliberate homicide.

In the weeks and months that followed, friends and family of Brown’s said he had long exhibited signs of mental illness, including a persistent delusion that he was John Wick, the movie hitman played by Keanu Reeves, or that actress Sandra Bullock was his girlfriend.

Such delusions could be linked to a serious thought disorder like schizophrenia that typically requires medication to avoid psychotic breaks.

District court records unsealed in May alleged that Brown entered the Owl Bar on the morning of the shootings with the makings of an improvised explosive device with intentions of destroying the bar’s jukebox. He told authorities he was being brainwashed by the jukebox and believed he, not Gwerder, owned the bar.

He left the bar, quickly returned with a rifle and shot each of the four victims, court records allege.

In the aftermath of the shooting, people sympathetic to Brown, a veteran of the U.S. Army, said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

At this writing, Brown remains confined at the Montana State Hospital for mental health evaluation and treatment.

Meanwhile, how have two deadly bar shootings in less than a year tainted Anaconda’s reputation statewide?

For years, the Smelter City, like Butte, was notorious for environmental pollution tied to smelting and mining. Yet in recent decades, Anaconda has emerged as a comeback community known for ready access to exceptional outdoors amenities.  

Anaconda resident Blake Hempstead weighed in at a recent meeting of commissioners for Anaconda-Deer Lodge County about the potential effects of the shootings. He spoke in the context of the use of city-county recreational assets like parks and ballfields.

“We’ve gone through hell in this community with the shootings over the last year, and what we really need to do in order to get past that stigma … because now we’re labeled,” he said. “We’ve been labeled in the past and we’ve worked past it, but now we’re labeled again. Let’s find a way to make our public spaces useful.”

Sheets of plywood cover the windows and doors of Brown’s family home, at 815 E. Third St., next door to the Owl Bar. Weeds cover the lot between the buildings.

Gwerder typically wears a handgun on his hip at work, a practice he adopted after the Aug. 1 shootings. He was asked what he might say to Brown or ask him if he had 10 minutes with the man who allegedly ended four lives and forever altered Gwerder’s life and the lives of many others.

“I wouldn’t ask nothing,” he replied. “They should have just shot him on sight and been done with it.”