At around 5:30 a.m. on February 27, the gunman was found dead inside a pickup truck situated in the middle of a two-lane highway. He was southeast of Summersville in neighboring Shannon County, located about fifteen or twenty miles away from the scenes of the shootings. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound earlier that day. A Rock Island Armory 1911 .45-caliber handgun, believed to be the same one used in the shootings, was recovered from the truck along with a stash of ammunition. The shootings were the worst mass murder in the history of Texas County, Missouri, which had an average of one homicide per year.
