Steve Crerar, a 62-year-old White male, left on what should have been an ordinary law-enforcement transport and never came home. In late April 1995, the Fremont County sheriff's lieutenant was driving a teenage prisoner back to the Wyoming Boys' School in Worland after the boy had run away and been arrested. Somewhere along that road, the trip turned into a killing.
Accounts from memorial and court sources say the youth managed to free one of his hands from a handcuff, seize Crerar's service weapon, and shoot him in the head. The violence ended not only Crerar's life on April 30, 1995, but also marked one of the starkest losses in Fremont County law enforcement memory, remembered years later as the death of a veteran officer carrying out a routine duty that suddenly became fatal.
The suspect publicly identified in online reporting and court records was John Michael Sides Jr., who was 17 at the time. The case did not linger for long in uncertainty over who was responsible; court summaries and later reporting describe Sides as the prisoner Crerar was transporting when the shooting happened. The same records show that after Crerar was killed, Sides was apprehended, and the investigation moved forward with him at the center of the case rather than with a field of unknown suspects. In that sense, the story quickly became less a mystery than a grim reconstruction of how a restrained juvenile in custody allegedly turned a county officer's own weapon against him during transport.
The prosecution that followed led to guilty pleas and severe punishment. According to Wyoming case materials and subsequent news coverage, Sides pleaded guilty in the Crerar case to first-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder, and he received two life sentences that were originally ordered to run consecutively. Years later, those sentences became the subject of new litigation after changes in constitutional law governing juvenile life-without-parole punishment. Even so, the Wyoming Supreme Court in 2021 upheld the lower court's decisions rejecting Sides' attempt to withdraw his plea, while reporting on the case noted that his sentence had been adjusted so the life terms would run concurrently rather than back-to-back. The conviction remained in place, and the courts did not disturb the underlying finding that Crerar was killed during that prisoner transport in 1995.
What remains in the online record is the shape of a tragedy more than any lingering question about who did it: a veteran deputy sheriff on a transport detail, a teenage runaway headed back to state custody, a struggle inside the confines of an official duty, and a fatal gunshot that transformed an errand of the justice system into a permanent loss. Memorial pages and retrospective coverage keep returning to that contrast, the ordinary beginning and the violent end, because it is what makes the case endure. There do not appear to be credible online reports pointing to additional suspects in Crerar's death; the case materials consistently identify Sides as the responsible party, and the later legal history centers on his plea, sentence, and failed appeals rather than on any unresolved question about who killed Steve Crerar.
