Nine months after Owl Bar slayings in Anaconda, bar owner still baffled as to motive

ANACONDA — David Gwerder said he remains mystified about what led Michael Paul Brown to enter the Owl Bar on the morning of Aug. 1 and, as alleged, shoot and kill the bartender and three patrons.

By all accounts, Brown knew the victims.

But Gwerder, who has owned the Owl Bar on East Third Street in Anaconda for about 30 years, doesn’t believe the shootings can be explained by Brown being allegedly mentally ill.

“That’s the only defense he has,” Gwerder said Sunday during an interview at the bar. “You gotta play the game. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

Brown, now 46, allegedly entered the bar on the morning of Aug. 1 with a burning pizza box ostensibly meant to be a fuse for a bucket-borne improvised explosive device — as it was described later by a crime scene evidence inventory that offered no specifics.

Gwerder said the device was apparently meant to divert the victims while Brown retrieved a rifle from his porch next door. Gwerder said he does not know what was in the bucket, if anything.

“I don’t know what the hell his motive was,” he said.

On May 8, Anaconda-Deer Lodge County District Court Judge Jeffery Dahood is due to release previously sealed records regarding Brown’s prosecution after news organizations pushed to make the documents public.

Gwerder believes the court sealed the charging documents early on to avoid pretrial publicity that could require a change of venue. The mass shooting attracted national media attention.

In September, Brown pleaded not guilty to four counts of deliberate homicide, attempted arson, theft and fleeing or eluding a peace officer.

The shooting victims were Nancy Lauretta Kelley, 64, a bartender, and customers Tony Wayne Palm, 74, Daniel Edwin Baillie, 59, and David Alan Leach, 70.

Authorities said Brown then fled the scene in a stolen pickup, which he abandoned off Stumptown Road in the vicinity of the Garrity Mountain Wildlife Management Area west of Anaconda, and bolted on foot.

And then, Gwerder said Sunday, Brown somehow had the presence of mind to escape capture for a week in the thickets, forests and foothills of the Anaconda Range, even though as many as 200 law enforcement personnel conducted an ambitious manhunt on foot, with drones, dogs and helicopters.

“He’s got 200 guys up there in the brush looking for him, and he can hide from them for a week?” Gwerder said.

Brown was captured Aug. 8 after an encounter the night before with a startled private landowner west of the Ranch Bar along Montana Highway 1. The fugitive had apparently been pushed out of the woods and thickets and across Warm Springs Creek the day before by a combination of a cold, drenching thunderstorm and a push by law enforcement.

The landowner, who requested anonymity when interviewed by The Montana Standard, said Brown expressed regret, reportedly saying, “I made a mistake back there.”

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen has said Brown was armed with a rifle but has declined to be more specific about the weapon. Gwerder said Sunday he has not been told what type of rifle was used or whether it was recovered.

“Nobody ever said anything to me about it,” he said.

Brown lived next door to the Owl Bar in a small, dilapidated house now boarded up.

“As far as I know, he didn’t have no water or power or nothing,” Gwerder said. “I just knew him from coming into the bar. He’d have a beer once in a while. He never sat and got drunk. We’d see him for a while and then he’d hang out at Carmel’s [Sports Bar & Grill] for a while and then he’d come back. We might not see him for a couple of weeks.”

Gwerder was asked about reports Brown could be delusional on occasion. Friends and acquaintances of Brown have reported he sometimes suffered from delusions, believing he was the movie hitman John Wick, a wizard or that he dated actress Sandra Bullock.

“Well, he had stories, but everybody’s got stories,” Gwerder said.

He said he’d seen no evidence that bar patrons teased Brown or, as later alleged by his niece, Clare Boyle, that an intoxicated patron from the Owl Bar once intended to urinate on Brown’s porch before she intervened.

“Everybody treated him like they treated everybody else,” Gwerder said. “If he started telling stories, people just let him tell stories. He never had no trouble in the bars. There was no fights, you know, nothing.”

People have speculated also that Brown, a veteran of the U.S. Army, has suffered from PTSD. Brown’s time in the Army included a deployment to Iraq from February 2004 to March 2005.

Gwerder said Brown’s sister had worked for him and so had Brown’s mother, now deceased. Rosemary “Rosie” Brown died in February 2021 and friends say her death hit Brown hard, as did the death of friend Jeremy Raasakka in August 2019. Raasakka’s obituary recounted, “Jeremy found a lot of happiness at the Owl Bar with all his extended family and very close friends…”

Rumors swirled after the shooting, including one suggesting Brown was angry about having been thrown out of the bar the night before.

Not true, Gwerder said.

“I worked the night before. I never seen him,” he said. “That’s why I wasn’t here that morning.”

But Gwerder was at the bar within 15 or 20 minutes of the shooting; those aftermath images remain, he said.

“A lot of people heard about it,” Gwerder said. “I seen it.”

He said Brown knew all the people he allegedly shot.

“He knew them all and every one of them had talked to him,” Gwerder said. “One of the guys who was murdered in there had sold him a pickup truck. He told [Brown], ‘If you ain’t going to drive it, I’ll buy it back.’ It’s still sitting in the backyard over there.”

Customer traffic to the Owl Bar is pretty much back to normal, Gwerder said Sunday. The bar was closed for three weeks after the shooting.

“There are a couple of people who still can’t walk in the bar that I know of, which is what it is,” Gwerder said.

Meanwhile, Boyle believes the system failed her uncle, whose delusional symptoms suggested schizophrenia.

“There are no excuses or words of defense for this awful tragedy,” Boyle said last fall. “Mental illness does not excuse these acts and, I can’t say it enough — these acts could have been prevented with proper reporting and a healthcare system that gave a damn about its veterans and citizens.”

Brown has been participating in a mental health evaluation at Montana State Hospital. A related status hearing is scheduled for Wednesday morning in Anaconda-Deer Lodge County District Court.