On the late morning of May 19, 2023, 59-year-old Steven Edward Hague, a male resident of Gillette, Wyoming, went out to a fifth-wheel camper situated on his rural property north of town. The camper stood along Midland Road, just beyond the city limits, where Hague allowed a man who worked for him to live. A short time later, smoke and flames were rising from the trailer, and a 911 call brought deputies, firefighters, and EMS racing up the road toward the burning camper.
When first responders arrived around 11 a.m., they found one of the men lying on the ground outside the trailer near the blaze, gravely wounded by a gunshot. Crews worked to keep their distance from the heat and the popping of ammunition igniting inside the camper as they tried to pull the victim away from the fire and begin CPR. Despite their efforts, Hague was pronounced dead at the scene. An autopsy later described how a. 308-caliber bullet had entered his upper left shoulder and tracked downward through his body, tearing through vital structures and reaching his heart and aorta, leaving no real chance of survival.
Inside the camper, once firefighters gained control of the flames, investigators discovered a second body, badly burned but also bearing a gunshot wound. This man was ultimately identified as 56-year-old Patrick M. Mahoney, who, according to investigators, both rented the camper space from Hague and worked for him. The two men were described as having a landlord-tenant relationship layered over an employer-employee dynamic. As the crime scene team and county coroner examined the remains and the trajectory of the bullets, authorities came to believe that Mahoney had shot Hague in the shoulder with a. 308-caliber weapon, then turned the gun on himself and fired a fatal shot to his own head inside the camper.
The scene that day drew not only the Campbell County Sheriff's Office but also the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation and specialized arson investigators, who were called in to sort out both the shooting and the fire that had consumed the trailer. Deputies recovered multiple firearms from the camper and noted that Hague did not appear to have been armed when the confrontation began. As they pieced together the evidence, officials emphasized that there was no indication of any third party being involved and no ongoing threat to the public; the violence, they concluded, had been contained entirely to the two men on Hague's property. Toxicology testing for both decedents was ordered as a routine step, and the cause of the fire itself remained under review, but the overarching finding was that the deaths resulted from a murder-suicide.
In the days that followed, public notices and memorial pages marked Hague's passing more quietly, recording only that he had “passed away at his home in Gillette” on May 19, 2023, and inviting condolences for his family. Gun-violence memorial sites listed him as a victim lost to gunfire in Gillette on that date, linking his name to the tragedy on Midland Road. Because the man investigators identified as the shooter died at the scene, there were no arrests, no criminal charges, and no trial stemming from Hague's death. The case was treated as a homicide followed by suicide, closed not in a courtroom but in the investigative files that documented how a landlord's ordinary visit to a tenant's camper ended in gunfire, fire, and the loss of two lives on the outskirts of Gillette.
