The Billings shooting that destroyed a family and a home on White Star Circle came into sharper focus Wednesday when Yellowstone County Sheriff Kent O’Donnell released the names of everyone involved and walked reporters through a timeline that spans barely twenty minutes.

Nine people died Sunday night. Eight were victims. The ninth was the man who killed them, and he was related to nearly all of them.

The Family

O’Donnell described the household as a blended family, with several generations present in the home when the attack began.

Dana and Barbara Smith, aged 73 and 72, were the married couple who owned the property on White Star Circle.

Evelyn Smith, 92, was also there. The sheriff identified her as the family matriarch.

The couple’s daughter, 39-year-old Megan Ireland-Ghekiere, was visiting along with her four children: Landon Ghekiere, 15; Owen Ireland, 13; Charlotte Ghekiere, 12; and Chloe Ireland, 7.

All eight were killed.

The Suspect

The man responsible was 44-year-old Alan Smith, a son of Dana and Barbara Smith.

O’Donnell said Alan Smith had lived at the White Star Circle address at some earlier point but was not residing there when the shooting occurred.

Correcting the Record

The sheriff devoted part of his Wednesday briefing to knocking down claims that had spread online in the days after the attack.

He stated plainly that the residence was not a drug house, contrary to rumors circulating on social media.

He also addressed speculation about the shooter’s relationship to the household. Alan Smith was not an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend of anyone inside. He was family.

O’Donnell’s decision to spend time on this reflects a difficulty investigators increasingly face, where speculation outpaces verified information and families end up reading things about their dead relatives that are simply false.

Twenty-Two Minutes

The timeline O’Donnell laid out is brief and specific.

At 5:49 p.m., the suspect arrived in the neighborhood.

Eleven minutes later, at approximately 6:00 p.m., neighbors reported hearing what they took to be fireworks.

Two minutes after that, the Billings 911 center received a call from a woman requesting help at the White Star Circle address.

Law enforcement units were dispatched over the following minutes.

At 6:06 p.m., fire alarms activated inside the home.

At 6:11 p.m., the first deputy reached the scene. Multiple gunshots were heard at that same moment.

Shortly afterward, a vehicle in the garage was reported burning.

Fires Set Before Police Arrived

O’Donnell said investigators believe multiple fires had already been started inside the house before any deputy got there.

Gunshots had also been heard before law enforcement arrived, meaning the shooting was well underway during the roughly nine minutes between the first 911 call and the first officer reaching the address.

The house was ultimately destroyed.

The Confrontation

The sheriff described how the encounter with Alan Smith unfolded.

Officers confronted him in the front yard of the home. He retreated back inside, where smoke was by then visible. More gunfire was heard from within the structure.

He then exited through the rear of the house into the backyard, where he shot himself.

Deputies located him in the backyard and carried him to a neighbor’s driveway, where they began lifesaving efforts before he was transported to a hospital. He was pronounced dead there.

O’Donnell noted a detail that captures how chaotic the scene was. At the moment they pulled him from the backyard and started treatment, officers did not yet know the man they were trying to save was the person responsible.

Defining the Incident

Asked about terminology, O’Donnell said the event meets the standard definition of a mass shooting, with nine total deaths including eight victims.

The combination of firearms and arson makes it unusual even among incidents of this kind. Fires set inside an occupied home complicate both the response and the eventual investigation, since evidence is consumed along with the structure.

What Investigators Still Face

Several questions remain unaddressed publicly.

No motive has been offered. The sheriff did not discuss whether there had been prior conflict within the family, whether Alan Smith had any documented history with law enforcement or mental health services, or how he obtained the weapons used.

Investigators will also need to reconstruct the sequence inside the house, work that will be considerably harder given the fire damage.

A Community Absorbing It

Billings is not a large city, and a loss of this scale reaches far beyond one street.

Four of the dead were children, the youngest seven years old. Their schools, their classmates, and their teachers are now dealing with something no training prepares anyone for.

The 92-year-old woman at the other end of the family had presumably watched most of these people grow up.

An entire branch of one family was ended in the span of about twenty minutes on an ordinary Sunday evening, in a house that no longer exists.