On the evening of March 27, 2018, a neighbor dispute over a dog in the 4000 block of East 106th Drive in Thornton, Colorado, ended with 42-year-old Dustin Schmidt shot and killed in his backyard. Schmidt lived there with his girlfriend, Vicki Branaghan. The conflict began when Branaghan’s German-shepherd mix, Bruno, jumped a fence into the yard of neighbor Michael Kourosh Sadeghi; Schmidt retrieved the dog and, according to Branaghan, swatted it on the rear and said bad boy. Branaghan says words were exchanged and Schmidt was shot in the back as he walked away, struck four times and pronounced dead at the scene after she rushed to him.

Sadeghi, then 32, was arrested shortly before 8 p.m. at his residence and charged with first-degree murder. He and his family later said he acted in self-defense, claiming he saw Schmidt pinning the dog and hitting it and that he felt threatened. Prosecutors highlighted what they described as Sadeghi’s complete lack of remorse at trial. An Adams County jury found Sadeghi guilty of first-degree murder in May 2019 and he was sentenced the following month.

Schmidt was remembered as kind-hearted, a guitar player who liked karaoke, who had moved from Oklahoma and worked as a warehouse supervisor. Did anyone in the neighborhood see the exchange that night or know more about how the dispute began?