Four killed in Montana bar shooting that is US’s ninth mass murder of 2025 | Montana
On Friday, four people were killed on Friday in a shooting in a Montana bar, which prompted locking in a neighborhood several kilometers while the authorities sought a wooded area for a suspect in the case.
The shooting has brought the number of mass murders so far this year to the United States, according to the archives of armed violence, a non-partisan resource that defines cases such as the murders in which four or more victims are killed.
All of these mass murders were shots and four took place during a 30 -day period from July 2. It was the second mass murder of the United States since Monday, when a man attacked a skyscraper from New York housing the seat of the National Football League and drew four dead before dying by suicide.
The mass murder of Friday in Montana occurred around 10:30 am at the OWL bar in Anaconda, according to the division of the criminal investigation of the State. The agency, which conducts the investigation into the shooting, confirmed that four people had been declared dead on the scene.
The suspect, who was identified as Michael Paul Brown, 45, lived next to the bar, according to public archives. The authorities said that a tactical team had cleaned Brown’s home and was last seen in the Stump Town region just west of Anaconda.
More than a dozen local and state police officers converged in this area, the lockable for no one has been allowed to enter or get out. A helicopter also flew over a neighboring mountain side while police officers were traveling among the trees, said Randy Clark – a retired police officer who lives there – told the Associated Press.
The owner of the OWL bar, David Gwerder, said that a bartender and three customers had been killed during the shooting. Gwerder, who was not there at the time, said that he thought that the four victims were the only ones present during the shooting.
Brown would have been armed, the Montana Highway Patrol said in a statement.
Brown served in the US military as an armor equipment from 2001 to 2005 and was deployed in Iraq from early 2004 to March 2005, according to an army spokesman. He was in the Montana National Guard from 2006 to March 2009 and left military service to the rank of sergeant.
While reports on the shooting spread in the city, business owners have locked their doors and sheltered inside with customers. At Caterpillars to Butterflies Childcare, a nursery for a few pâtés from the shots scene, the Sage Huot owner said that she had kept the children inside all day after someone called him to share the violence.
“We constantly do training exercises, fire exercises and active shooting exercises, so we locked the installation, locked the doors, and we have a quiet place where we play activities far from all our windows and doors,” said Huot.
Anaconda is around 75 miles (120 km) southeast of Missoula. A city of around 9,000 inhabitants in a valley hampered by mountains, it was founded by copper barons that took advantage of neighboring mines in the late 1800s.
The owner of the Firefly Cafe in Anaconda said that she had locked her business around 11 a.m. Friday after being alerted from the shooting by a friend.
“We are Montana, so firearms are not new to us,” said the owner of the Barbie Café Nelson. “So that our city is locked up, everyone is fairly shaken.”
