On a quiet Sunday afternoon over Labor Day weekend in 2022, Olvin Yonairo Montoya Ramirez, a 37-year-old Hispanic/Latino man, drove with his young son from Greeley, Colorado, toward the open farm country south of Pine Bluffs, Wyoming. He was heading to a rural property on County Road 161, about eleven miles south of town, to pick up his roommate, 31-year-old Yigner Rodrigo Turcios-Romero. The two men knew the place well: it belonged to their friend, Aparicio Garcia, and the detached garage on the property had become an informal gathering spot, a place where co-workers could share beers and talk about life.
Earlier that morning, Turcios-Romero had gone out to Garcia's house, and by midday the two were in the garage, drinking beer and talking about Turcios-Romero's relationship troubles. As they talked, Turcios-Romero called Montoya Ramirez for a ride, asking him to come out from Greeley. Around 12:40 p.m., the pickup truck carrying Montoya Ramirez and his son pulled into the property. The boy stayed in the truck while his father walked into the garage to join the other two men, who all knew each other from previous work together.
What happened next began with a brief, tense interruption. Turcios-Romero's girlfriend arrived at the scene, pulled up in a car, and demanded the keys to her Jeep, which he handed over before she sped away. After she left, witnesses later told investigators that Turcios-Romero began moving in and out of the garage multiple times, clearly agitated. In the closed space of the detached garage, the conversation about his relationship problems took a darker turn. At some point, he drew a handgun from his waistband, uttered words to the effect of “this is what you get,” and fired a single shot into Montoya Ramirez's head. The gunshot ended the conversation in an instant and left the others stunned.
In the immediate aftermath, according to accounts later given to deputies, Turcios-Romero pointed the gun at Garcia and told him something like “we are accomplices now,” then asked where the boy was. Garcia, confronted with the armed suspect and the child nearby, tried to defuse the moment, telling him not to do anything stupid. Outside, the boy had heard the gunshot from the truck. He started to walk toward the garage, only to be intercepted and turned back by the adults before he could see what had happened to his father. Emergency responders were called, and Montoya Ramirez was rushed for medical care, but he did not survive; an autopsy later concluded that he died from a gunshot wound to the head.
While deputies converged on the rural property that afternoon, Turcios-Romero fled. Early alerts warned that he was believed to have possibly returned to Colorado and should be considered armed and dangerous, prompting concern in both Wyoming and neighboring communities. In reality, later investigations revealed that he had not gone far at all. After leaving the property, he escaped on a bicycle and hid overnight in a nearby cornfield, remaining out of sight even as law enforcement searched for him and the public remained unaware that a murder suspect was hiding in the area. The local sheriff's office later acknowledged that it had failed to warn residents promptly that an armed homicide suspect was at large, waiting a day before issuing a public notice.
By the early afternoon of September 5, the day after the shooting, the suspect's flight came to an end. Rather than being cornered, Turcios-Romero walked back to Garcia's house around 1 p.m. and surrendered. Deputies detained him without incident, bringing the brief manhunt to a close. Reports from the time describe him being booked into the Laramie County Detention Center on a large cash bond while investigators pieced together witness statements, timeline, and physical evidence from the garage and surrounding property.
In the days that followed, Laramie County authorities formally charged Turcios-Romero in connection with the killing. Local reporting describes him facing a first-degree murder charge in state court for the fatal shooting of Montoya Ramirez, while at least one national crime outlet referenced a second-degree murder count as the case developed; all accounts agree that he was jailed on a homicide charge stemming from the single gunshot in the detached garage. He was arraigned in circuit court, his case was bound over to district court, and he later entered a plea of not guilty before a Laramie County District Court judge, with a jury trial initially scheduled for March 13, 2023. As of the latest publicly accessible coverage, the case is presented as still centered on that original allegation: that a visit meant to resolve relationship troubles in a quiet rural garage ended instead with a father's death and his roommate facing life-altering murder charges, even as the ultimate outcome of those charges has not yet been widely reported in open sources.
