2 months after Yellowstone shooting, witness recalls ‘Twilight Zone’
During Yellowstone shooting, Oregon mom fled with daughter before grappling with information vacuum.
By Kate Ready
Jackson Hole News&Guide
Via Wyoming News Exchange
JACKSON — Yellowstone National Park seemed like the perfect place for Jennifer Thomas to celebrate her 39th birthday. She’d been there before but wanted to show her two kids a national park close to her heart that they had never seen.
After waking up on the Fourth of July, Thomas and her 17-year-old daughter crept out of camp to head over to the Canyon Lodge eatery as her son and sister slept. But the quiet morning soon would be shattered by gunfire as the Albany, Oregon, mother and daughter found themselves at the center of an attempted mass shooting in America’s first national park.
Two months later, Thomas is still angered by the surreal experience, questioning how the park and concessionaire handled the incident. She describes what felt like a black hole in the immediate aftermath, with little information available to aid visitors, and ongoing trauma and nightmares in the days and weeks that followed.
With pine trees towering overhead, Thomas awoke to a sunny day. As she was putting her shoes on, her daughter woke up, and the pair then drove past other sites filled with sleeping campers. The campground, one of the most popular in the park, contains 270 sites.
After three nights at the Canyon Campground, they planned to check out that day and head south to Grand Teton National Park.
The pair arrived at the Canyon Lodge restaurant at around 7:45 a.m. and grabbed coffee, eggs and potatoes. Thomas was trying to figure out where to pay around 8 a.m. when she saw two park rangers walk into the cafe, one carrying a semiautomatic rifle.
That seemed odd to Thomas, who had never seen rangers walking around with that type of firearm before. But she continued on, walking over to a coffee stand where she chatted with an employee about Oregon chai. That’s when Thomas, standing with her back to the door, heard a “really loud noise,” giving an account similar to other witnesses there that day.
“It didn’t sound like gunfire,” she said. “It sounded like a bunch of things being knocked over in a kitchen.”
The woman speaking with Thomas stopped “dead in her tracks,” Thomas said.
“She starts ducking down and shooing me and my daughter away,” Thomas said. “All of a sudden she’s like, ‘Run now.’”
Thomas still doesn’t know what the woman saw that morning, but she and her daughter ran out a side door, leaving all of their stuff behind.
When Thomas got outside, she heard gunfire immediately to the right of her, about six gunshots. It was loud enough that her daughter’s hands flew up to cover her ears.
“I started screaming for my daughter to run to the car,” Thomas said.
As she ran, Thomas remembered her mind focusing on one thing: Don’t drop the keys.
Behind Thomas and her daughter, a young girl also ran toward Thomas’ vehicle, begging to be let in. Thomas said yes, and all three women jumped in. The college-aged stranger in Thomas’ back seat was crying, saying she knew that this was going to happen.
Ducking down, Thomas put the car in reverse and flew out of the parking lot back toward the campground.
Thomas and her family would learn what happened in the hours and days to come, mostly from news reports and Facebook groups. According to statements released by Yellowstone, 28-year-old Floridian and Xanterra Parks and Resorts employee Samson Lucas Bariah Fussner was the shooter that day. He was killed on site around 8 a.m. near the Canyon Lodge dining facility. A ranger was injured during an exchange of gunfire.
Fussner allegedly held a woman hostage around midnight in a residence in Canyon Village the night before. In a statement released five days after the shooting, Yellowstone stated that Fussner allegedly threatened to kill her and others and carry out mass shootings at Fourth of July events. The FBI is investigating the incident.
Employees of Xanterra — a company that operates lodging, restaurants, campgrounds and concessions in Yellowstone and other national parks — alleged afterward that Fussner had been reported multiple times earlier in the summer for making women uncomfortable.
Past and present Xanterra employees told the News&Guide that complaints regarding sexual assault, domestic violence and safety concerns often go unresolved. Thomas said statements made by the Xanterra employee who sheltered in her back seat that morning “solidifies that.”
As Thomas sped to the campground to pick up her sister and son, she said, the woman stated she worked at Canyon Village.
“She’s crying in my back seat as I’m flying to Canyon Campground, and she’s like, ‘I knew this was going to happen. I knew there was going to be a school shooter,’” Thomas recalled.
After picking up her family, Thomas headed back to Canyon Village 10 minutes later, the only place she had service, to try and figure out what was happening and drop the young woman off with her coworkers.
In the parking lot, Thomas said, she saw an ambulance stationed next to the side entrance of the dining facility, right where she and her daughter had been running. She still didn’t know what happened or if a shooter, or multiple, were still on the loose.
After dropping the employee off with her coworkers, Thomas’ family left the park, in search of service to try and piece together what had happened. The family drove through the exit at West Yellowstone where they inquired inside stores, stopped at visitor centers and combed the internet inside a McDonald’s for details about the shooting.
Information was emerging online stating the shooter had been killed, but in person, “nobody had any idea,” Thomas said.
All around them tourists smiled, took pictures and laughed. She said it felt like the “Twilight Zone.”
“We’re trying to make sense of what we just experienced, and all around us these people were having the best days of their lives,” Thomas said.
The group went back into the park a few hours later to pack up their campsite. Rangers working at the booth for the park entrance also didn’t know what had happened.
“We come through the West Yellowstone entrance, and I’m asking them, ‘Hey, is it clear to go back to Canyon Village right now?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t know anything about that.’”
Back at the campground, Thomas said, Xanterra employees were checking people in “business as usual,” with a brief mention that the cafe may be closed tomorrow, without context.
“I felt like a crazy person because I know what I just experienced,” Thomas said. “And it was like, ‘La dee da dee da, what a great Fourth of July day.’”
As Thomas checked out several hours later, a mass of people continued to throng the check-in desk.
Two days later, Xanterra closed the 270-site campground as well as the Canyon Lodge and cabins, totaling more than 500 rooms. An online alert July 6 explained the decision, and leaflets were posted on guests’ doors.
A sign Xanterra posted on a campground picnic bench and provided to the News&Guide said: “We have been instructed to shut down all our services. We apologize for the inconvenience. You will receive a full refund.”
Thomas said that on July 6, the same day Xanterra closed its lodging, she cradled her 17-year-old daughter in a tent in Vernal, Utah.
“People were lighting off fireworks, and I’ve got my daughter under a blanket crying because she’s freaking traumatized by the gunfire that just happened,” Thomas said.
Her sister still has dreams of waking up to the sound of gunfire, gripped by a sense of panic after finding her niece and sister missing.
Two months after that morning, Thomas’ voice rises in volume when she recalls the response. No one from management checked in with her, and it felt like employees were left in the wind to deal with a situation they didn’t know how to deal with.
More information would have put her at ease.
“I’m glad that the national park police were there and everything, but at the same time … that could have gone a totally different way,” Thomas said. “Why were we there? Why didn’t you let us know? I walked my daughter in there.”
She hasn’t heard a word from Xanterra, she said. The company knows she was in the building that morning, Thomas said, because the dining area partially refunded her for money she spent before running out.
“Not one time did anybody ever reach out to me and say, ‘Hey, we know you were staying at the campground. Were you in the village that morning? Are you okay?’”
She called on Xanterra to develop better protocols and planning for emergencies.
“There should’ve been a more proactive approach,” she said.
Asked what the active shooter protocols are, and what the company has learned from the incident, Mike Keller, Xanterra’s general manager for Yellowstone, wrote in an emailed statement that the company extends “heartfelt condolences to those who were impacted by this incident.”
The Xanterra statement continued: “The safety and well-being of our employees, guests and the wider community are our top priorities, and we are committed to providing a safe environment for everyone. The events of that day were unprecedented in Yellowstone. Our active assailant protocols were initiated during the event, and we want to again thank the National Park Service law enforcement rangers for their leadership in resolving the situation. Continuous improvement is the bedrock of any effective crisis response program. In that effort, Xanterra continues to review the July 4 incident carefully and evaluate our event response.”
The family still hasn’t made sense of the situation, Thomas said.
“There are some serious flaws in the way that situation was handled,” Thomas said. “I’m hopeful more people step up and say, ‘This is not okay what happened that day.’”
This story was published on September 4, 2024.