John J. Buxton, a 29-year-old White man from Rock Springs, Wyoming, was killed on September 14, 1919, in a case that began in the hills north of town and ended in a burst of violence that stunned Sweetwater County. Buxton had served in the Army during World War I and afterward became a deputy game warden. That Sunday he was traveling back toward Rock Springs from the coal camp at East Plane with his pregnant wife, Jennie, and their small son when he came upon two teenage boys, Joseph Omeyc and
John Kolman, out shooting rabbits near the Union Pacific Number 8 mine. Accounts agree that Buxton confronted them, took Omeyc's rifle, and was acting under the game and firearms laws then in force in Wyoming, which were especially harsh toward non-citizens.
The moment turned deadly with almost no warning. While Buxton had removed the rifle, he did not know that Omeyc was also carrying a concealed revolver. As Buxton turned with the confiscated gun, Omeyc shot him. The wound proved fatal, and Buxton died before he could reach the hospital. What might have looked at first like a poaching stop quickly became one of the most notorious killings in early Wyoming law-enforcement history, remembered in part because Buxton was the first Wyoming game warden killed in the line of duty.
The principal suspect was Joseph Omeyc, described in the sources as a 17-year-old Austrian immigrant living in Rock Springs. John Kolman, 16, was with him at the time of the shooting and appears in the historical record as the companion and witness rather than the gunman. Contemporary and later historical accounts identify Omeyc as the shooter, and the case against him appears to have formed quickly. He was arrested after the killing and charged with first-degree murder. The deeper background of the case made it more than a simple encounter in the field: historians later tied it to Wyoming statutes that singled out aliens for special gun licensing requirements, laws that shaped both the confrontation and the public reaction that followed.
The case did not end with a full murder trial and jury conviction on the top count. Instead, Omeyc later pleaded guilty in district court at Green River to second-degree murder on March 17, 1920. He was sentenced to 20 to 21 years in the state penitentiary at Rawlins. Later reporting states that he was paroled in 1924 and then violated parole and disappeared, leaving the legal ending to the case with an uneasy, unfinished feel despite the formal sentence. No comparable arrest or murder charge is reflected in the sources for Kolman.
What remains in the historical record is a bleak, intimate scene: a young officer on a dusty road outside Rock Springs, his family nearby, a routine enforcement stop, and then a hidden pistol changing everything in an instant. Buxton was buried with military honors, and the killing lingered in Wyoming memory not only as the death of a game warden, but as a story tangled up with wartime suspicion, anti-immigrant law, and a justice process that secured a plea and prison sentence but never erased the violence of that afternoon.
