2017 Plano shooting

On the evening of September 10, 2017, a mass shooting occurred at a home on West Spring Creek Parkway in Plano, Texas, during a Dallas Cowboys watch party hosted by Meredith Lane (Hight) for coworkers and friends. Officers responded to reports of 30 to 40 shots fired at around 8 p.m. Police entered the home and shot and killed the gunman, later identified as 32-year-old Spencer James Hight. Inside, officers found nine adults with gunshot wounds; seven were dead at the scene, and two others were transported to a hospital, where one later died, bringing the total death toll to eight, with one survivor.

Spencer Hight and Meredith Lane had met as students at the University of Texas at Dallas and married in May 2011. They purchased the home where the shooting occurred in 2015, around the same time Hight lost his contracting job at Texas Instruments. The couple had no children. They stopped living together in March 2017, and Meredith filed for divorce in July, citing "discord or conflict of personalities." Meredith's mother later said her daughter sought the divorce because Hight was physically abusive and an alcoholic, and described an incident in which Hight had slammed her daughter's head against a wall that was not reported to police. Friends said Hight had become isolated, was unable to find work, and was drinking heavily in the period before the shooting.

The apparent target of the attack was Meredith, his estranged wife, from whom he was separated with a divorce pending. Among the dead were two men who had participated in the couple's wedding: James Richard Dunlop, the best man, and Rion Christopher Morgan, a groomsman. Plano Police Chief Greg W. Rushin said the department had "never had a shooting of this magnitude."

In the aftermath, the Junior League of Collin County organized a vigil for the victims ten days after the attack. Hight's family issued a statement saying there was "no rational excuse for his horrific actions" and expressing condolences to the victims' families.

In April 2019, a bartender at Local Public House in Plano, where Hight had been drinking before the shooting, was charged with serving alcohol to a visibly intoxicated person; texts and reported statements indicated she had noticed Hight's intoxication and behavior with a knife before he left the bar. A grand jury declined to indict her in October 2019. In 2021, the sole surviving wounded victim, Carly Shockey, was awarded $85 million by a jury in a civil lawsuit against the bar for serving Hight while intoxicated.