Brandon Machado, a 46-year-old White man, was shot inside a home in the northern part of Casper, Wyoming, on February 16, 2017, in a night that began with a frantic 911 call and ended with two people bleeding on the floor. When officers arrived, they found Machado and a woman he lived with suffering from gunshot wounds; he was critically injured, and she was taken to the hospital with her name withheld at the time.
Machado did not survive—authorities said he died the following day, turning what first looked like a chaotic double shooting into a death investigation that rippled outward to family, neighbors, and investigators trying to piece together what happened behind the closed front door.
Months later, a longer account of the violence surfaced in a July 2017 newspaper feature centered on the surviving woman, Karen Lynn, who described a volatile relationship and an escalating confrontation inside their Casper living room. In her telling, Machado demanded pills, then shot her in the face; she stumbled outside into the cold, only to be dragged back in. She described fading in and out of consciousness, blood filling her vision, and the moment she wound up with a small handgun in her hands as Machado pressed the weapon against his own head and urged her to pull the trigger. She said she fired as he forced the gun into position, and his body fell onto her—leaving her alive but grievously injured, and him dead.
As for arrests and suspects, the public reporting indicates the investigation focused on Lynn's actions in the immediate aftermath, but prosecutors ultimately declined to charge her. The same July 2017 feature reports that Natrona County prosecutors decided in June not to pursue criminal charges, with the decision framed around the difficulty of disproving her claim of self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt. No other suspects are described in the available reporting tied to this incident, and no arrest or prosecution of a different person is identified in the sources that discuss Machado's death and the shooting inside the home.
