Wrongful death suit challenges Thermopolis cop for illegally entering home

by Andrew Graham, WyoFile

The first police killing in the town of Thermopolis’ history started with an investigation into methamphetamine use by workers at a local McDonald’s.

It ended with a bloody, close-range shootout inside a trailer home after an officer shouldered his way inside without a warrant. The officer, Sgt. Michael Mascorro, suffered a gunshot wound that came harrowingly close to killing him. While bleeding profusely, Mascorro shot and killed McDonald’s employee Buck Laramore.

Though Laramore shot first, wounding Mascorro while the officer’s gun was still in his holster, his mother and widow sued the Thermopolis Police Department in the U.S. District Court of Wyoming this week. They allege Mascorro had no grounds to enter the trailer and that Laramore was defending himself against a police officer who was, in essence, a lawless intruder into his home. 

“This was a completely avoidable incident,” Sweetwater County District Attorney Dan Erramouspe wrote at the time, according to the Thermopolis Independent Record. The prosecutor, who conducted a criminal review of the shooting and is not involved in the civil lawsuit, ruled Mascorro entered Laramore’s home illegally. Town officials later rejected that conclusion. 

In their lawsuit, Laramore’s relatives cite self-defense laws like Wyoming’s controversial “stand your ground” statute and the castle doctrine, both of which generally allow homeowners to protect themselves with deadly force from an intruder. While Erramouspe found Mascorro had entered the home illegally, the prosecutor also found he was justified in shooting back at Laramore. The state’s castle doctrine carries an exception for when the intruder in one’s home is a police officer, and when the shooting started, Mascorro was defending himself, the prosecutor wrote. 

The family’s lawyers disagree. “It was Mascorro’s own reckless and deliberate conduct that unreasonably created his use of force,” they wrote in the complaint. 

Neither lawyers for the plaintiffs nor Thermopolis Police Chief Pat Cornwall responded to messages from WyoFile this week seeking comment on the case. 

Investigation

The violence on April 28, 2023 can be traced back to two days earlier, when a different Thermopolis police officer arrested a different McDonald’s employee who had an outstanding warrant. When the officer helped that employee out of her patrol car at the jail, she found a glass pipe on the car seat, according to a report on the shooting compiled by Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation agents. The employee had smoked meth from the pipe that morning with one of his McDonald’s colleagues, he told the officer. 

Thermopolis police officers decided to contact the area health inspector, Jamie George, for a combined investigation into meth use among the McDonald’s employees. That investigation led Mascorro and a Hot Springs County sheriff’s deputy with a drug dog to the restaurant on April 28 — where Laramore had just started his work shift. 

Mascorro found Laramore suspicious. He saw Laramore leave the men’s room, and soon afterward the drug dog detected meth hidden in containers in the bathroom’s baby changing station, according to the DCI investigation. The officer asked Laramore to take a drug test, which the McDonald’s worker declined to do. When Mascorro asked for his name, Laramore misspelled it by one letter. He also said his birth year was 1988, when it was in fact 1989. 

Laramore left the McDonald’s shortly after the exchange and returned home. When Mascorro learned Laramore had given him a misspelled name and the wrong birth year, he called a Hot Springs County prosecutor, according to an interview with the prosecutor conducted by the DCI investigators. 

Kelly Owens, the prosecutor, told Mascorro they could not connect Laramore to the meth in the bathroom. The officer then said he wanted to arrest Laramore for interfering with the investigation by giving false information about himself. Owens suggested Mascorro could just write Laramore a ticket instead, according to the lawsuit. 

But Mascorro wanted to arrest Laramore, he would later tell DCI agents. 

A two-decade veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Mascorro had joined the Thermopolis Police Department eight years prior. At the time of the shooting, he was the agency’s second in command. The DCI agents who investigated Laramore’s death asked Mascorro why he went to Laramore’s home alone. The small police department was shorthanded, Mascorro told the investigators, and he did not have an option for backup. “It’s the nature of this job,” he said, according to the DCI report. 

During his tenure in Thermopolis, Mascorro had received four use-of-force complaints, according to the lawsuit. He was accused of kicking a man and knocking him to the ground while arresting him, and in another instance, of escalating an encounter into a fight at Thermopolis’s signature drinking establishment, the One-Eyed Buffalo. Just six days before the shootout, the Wyoming Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission had cleared Mascorro of any wrongdoing in those incidents. 

The lawsuit claims the department should have corrected aggressive behavior by Mascorro, and that doing so may have prevented the fatal shootout. 

Laramore’s McDonald’s colleagues described him to DCI agents as a “big-hearted” and good worker who sometimes felt down about life. When agents asked one colleague if Laramore was suicidal, she told them he would never kill himself because of his love for his wife. 

According to the DCI report, however, Mascorro learned from his dispatcher on his way to Laramore’s home that the man also had a record of assault charges. Laramore was well armed — DCI agents would recover three pistols when they searched the home after the shooting. Agents also found meth, fentanyl and marijuana.

Mascorro arrived on Laramore’s doorstep several hours after their first encounter at the McDonald’s, according to the DCI investigation. He banged on the door, which Laramore came to but did not exit. A storm door separated the two men as they spoke. Mascorro told Laramore to come outside so he could be arrested for interference. Laramore said he would not do so. 

The situation would go “one of two ways,” Mascorro suggested, according to the lawsuit. Either Laramore would step outside, or Mascorro would “break the door in.”

Laramore closed the door of his home. Mascorro opened the storm door and began to ram the main door with his shoulder. 

Shootout 

The Thermopolis Police Department released selective portions of Mascorro’s body camera footage from the incident, accompanying the footage with narration that gives the law enforcement view of the encounter. Mascorro entered the trailer because he believed Laramore could flee out the back door, the narration suggests. 

In his interview with DCI, Mascorro said he considered Laramore’s closing of the door in his face the equivalent of fleeing arrest, and felt if he left to secure a warrant, Laramore would be gone when he returned.

In the lawsuit, the Laramore family’s attorneys argue Buck Laramore couldn’t have destroyed any evidence in the interference case because he had already given Mascorro the false information. There was no threat to the officer’s safety when the two men talked in the doorway, and Laramore’s refusal to step outside was not a crime, the complaint argued. 

Laramore’s wife, Brandi, was also home. 

When Mascorro broke through the door, he found Laramore standing in a hallway, pointing a Smith & Wesson handgun at him with both hands. 

Mascorro’s gun was still in its holster, according to the DCI report. Laramore fired once and put a .45-caliber bullet through Mascorro’s right arm and into his chest, where it broke one of the officer’s ribs and passed through his lung, narrowly missing his spine. 

The shot knocked Mascorro to the ground. 

Laramore advanced toward him, and according to the DCI report, likely fired another shot, though it didn’t strike Mascorro and it’s unclear where the round went. 

Lying on the ground, Mascorro called on Laramore to “stop, stop.” 

According to the lawsuit, Laramore did not fire another shot. 

Mascorro told the DCI agents he did not know why Laramore did not shoot him again, in the head, while he lay on the ground. But Mascorro pulled his pistol and began firing, shooting seven times. 

Brandi Laramore hid in the home’s bathroom. According to the DCI report, she took the family dog into the bathroom with her. But in a frame from the body camera footage, the dog runs across the trailer floor as Mascorro, now standing, aims his gun toward Laramore.

It’s unclear if Mascorro hit Laramore during his first fusillade. Laramore appears to have retreated into another room of the trailer. According to the lawsuit, Laramore then stepped into Mascorro’s line of sight, now unarmed, and the officer fired three times. According to Mascorro’s interview with DCI agents, the officer believed Laramore was tactically peering around the corner and was still trying to shoot and kill him. 

Mascorro hit Laramore with his first shot, he believed, and possibly his second. 

This time it was Laramore who fell to the ground and yelled, “stop, stop,” according to the lawsuit.  

Mascorro, now severely weakened by his injuries, collapsed to the floor. He was able to stagger out of the home before collapsing again in the yard, where arriving officers found him. 

Inside the trailer, Laramore died in his wife’s arms, she told DCI agents. 

Medics airlifted Mascorro to a hospital in Casper, where the officer came in and out of consciousness. When Mascorro returned to Thermopolis, he did so as a hero, welcomed with a parade, according to the Cowboy State Daily. However, after Erramouspe cleared Mascorro of any homicide charges but found he should not have entered Laramore’s home, the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission again investigated the officer and considered decertifying him. 

Decertifying an officer is the review board’s strongest and rarely used sanction — it would have prevented Mascorro from working in law enforcement anywhere in Wyoming. 

POST, led at the time by former Casper police chief Chris Walsh, chose not to take that step. After a review of Erramouspe’s findings, the DCI report, state law and department policy, town officials in June 2024 decided Mascorro would return to duty. 

“The Town believes Sgt. Mascaro did not violate policy or the law,” Thermopolis Mayor Adam Estenson said in a statement announcing the officer’s return. 

“I look forward to continued conversation on what policing looks like for Thermopolis into the future,” he continued. 

Though the shootout was the town’s first police killing, according to an October 2023 statement from Estenson, a second would soon follow. In September 2024, a different Thermopolis police officer conducting a wellness check would run into a mentally ill man, Jared Gottula, who was swinging a bat wildly in his yard. Gottula advanced on the officer’s patrol vehicle and the officer struck him with it. During the tense encounter that followed, the officer and a Hot Springs County sheriff’s deputy fired more than 20 rounds, killing Gottula.

A review found the officers began shooting after Gottula advanced on the deputy with the bat raised. Both officers were cleared of any wrongdoing, and to date, no lawsuit has been filed. 

This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

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