2018 Melcroft Car Wash Shooting

In the early morning of January 28, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at Ed's Car Wash in the unincorporated community of Melcroft, in Saltlick Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. The shooting left five people dead, including the shooter, and one additional survivor with minor injuries.

According to police accounts reported by Wikipedia, the incident began as what was supposed to be a fistfight between Timothy O'Brien Smith, 28, and William "Billy" Porterfield, 27. Smith had previously been in a relationship with Chelsie Cline, 25, who was at the time dating Porterfield, and Smith reportedly had an ongoing feud with him. Surveillance footage reportedly showed Smith grabbing Porterfield from behind earlier that morning at a nearby bar, the Tall Cedars.

Cline, her half-brother Seth Cline, 21, Porterfield, a friend named Cortney Snyder, 23, and an unidentified woman arrived at the car wash to meet Smith, apparently unaware of what was about to happen. Smith arrived wearing a body armor carrier without ballistic panels and armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a .308-caliber rifle, and a 9mm handgun.

Smith opened fire using the AR-15 and the 9mm handgun. He first shot and killed Cline and Porterfield in the car wash's parking lot as they exited their sedan. He then killed Snyder and Seth Cline as they sat in a pickup truck. A woman who was also in the vehicle survived after being taken to the hospital. Three vehicles — two pickup trucks and a sedan — were towed from the scene.

After killing the four victims, Smith turned the gun on himself and shot himself in the head. He initially survived the self-inflicted gunshot wound but died at a hospital just before 10:00 p.m. that same day. An autopsy confirmed that all four fatal victims had been shot multiple times.

At the time, this shooting was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States in 2018, a distinction it held for seventeen days until it was surpassed by the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

This dossier is based on a single detailed source (Wikipedia's article on Melcroft, Pennsylvania). Two additional references cited by that article — a USPS webpage and a CBS News report — are included here as corroborating citations, though their specific content could not be independently verified from the retrieved text.