Aaron Sadler was a 39-year-old white woman from Green River, Wyoming, whose life revolved around family, work, and the small-town community that had known her since childhood. She grew up and went to school in Green River, graduating from Green River High School in 2001, and eventually became the manager at the Embassy Tavern, where regulars knew her behind the bar and friends knew her as someone who loved photography, fly fishing, and spending long stretches of time with the people she cared
about most. Her obituary describes her close ties to her parents, her sister, extended family, and two sons, and notes that she was remembered as warm and outgoing, the kind of person whose presence filled a room even in the everyday routines of work and home.
On the night of June 23, 2022, that ordinary routine shattered. Late in the evening, Green River police were first dispatched to Riverview Drive after a report that a man had pointed a pistol at another person during a disturbance. As officers were responding to that call, another urgent report came in at about 10:40 p.m. of an active shooter at the Embassy Tavern, the bar where Sadler was working. According to police releases, the suspect, identified as 51-year-old Douglas Wolf of Green River, entered the bar armed with a. 22 Magnum pistol and began firing, striking multiple people inside.
Inside the tavern and out into the back area, gunfire turned a familiar local hangout into a crime scene. When officers arrived, they found two people dead and one person gravely wounded. The victims were later publicly identified as Sadler, Jessica Wells, and Brian Nussbaum; Sadler and Wells died from their injuries, while Nussbaum was transported by ambulance and survived after being treated for a gunshot wound. Reports from the scene and later news coverage consistently described the event as a double homicide with a third victim injured, and investigators quickly linked the earlier disturbance on Riverview Drive with the shooting at the bar as part of a single unfolding incident.
Wolf fled Green River after the shooting, triggering an intense overnight manhunt that pulled in multiple agencies, including the Green River Police Department, Sweetwater County Sheriff's Office, Rock Springs Police Department, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, and the FBI. Officers warned residents in parts of Rock Springs to stay inside as they searched industrial areas where they believed the suspect was hiding. By the following morning, tactical teams with K9 units located Wolf in an unoccupied industrial building on Mesa Drive north of Rock Springs, still armed and holding the firearm to his head. Officers reported seeing blood and signs of a self-inflicted gunshot wound; as they moved to take him into custody, he fired the weapon at himself. Tactical officers secured the gun, began life-saving efforts, and transported him by ambulance to Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County, where he was pronounced dead shortly after 11 a.m. on June 24, 2022. Law enforcement agencies repeatedly emphasized that no officers fired their weapons during the encounter and that the portion of the incident involving Wolf's death was turned over to state investigators for review.
In the days that followed, police and local news outlets described Wolf as the sole suspect in the double homicide at the Embassy Tavern and noted that investigators were still working to establish a clear motive for the attack. Public statements from the Green River Police Department and associated agencies did not name any additional suspects, and the investigation shifted from an active manhunt to reconstructing the sequence of events and processing the scene. Because Wolf died from his injuries while officers were attempting to apprehend him, there were no formal public court records of charges filed against him in this case, and there was never a criminal trial or conviction related to Sadler's killing, even though law enforcement consistently referred to him as the suspect in the two deaths and the shooting of the surviving victim.
While investigators worked through the evidence, Green River itself rallied around the families of those caught in the shooting. Obituaries and local coverage painted a picture of Sadler as deeply rooted in the town and at the center of a close family, and benefit events quickly sprang up to help those left behind. The Embassy Tavern organized a “Green River Strong” weekend in mid-July 2022, with concerts, a pig roast, bingo, tournaments, raffles, and auctions to raise money for the families of the two women who were killed and for the survivors recovering from injuries. Online memorials, including a page on the National Gun Violence Memorial, mark the date of June 23, 2022, as the night Sadler was “lost to gun violence” in Green River, placing her name alongside others who died in shootings but whose stories remain anchored in the everyday lives they led before the crime that ended them.
