On September 27, 2015, 44-year-old Chad Killian was shot while hunting in the wooded hills near 920 Northcutts Cove Road in Beersheba Springs, Tennessee. Killian, a logging equipment operator from nearby Altamont and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was transported from the remote scene but died later that day. He left behind a wife, two sons, his mother, and several siblings.

Early accounts characterized the shooting as a hunting accident, but the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Grundy County Sheriff’s Office later concluded that Killian’s hunting companion was responsible for the fatal wound. In November 2015 the companion, 45-year-old Robin Smartt Jr., was indicted by a Grundy County grand jury on charges of reckless homicide and being a felon in possession of a firearm and was booked into the Grundy County Jail.

What details about that day in the woods might still help explain how a hunting outing ended in a fatal shooting?