A community was left reeling after Byron, Wyoming, mother Tranyelle Harshman killed her four children and then turned the gun on herself on February 10.
Three of Harshman’s four daughters died at the scene, but 7-year-old Olivia succumbed to her injuries at a local hospital on Saturday, Feb. 15.
After the tragedy, onlookers are left asking: Why? While Harshman’s motive might never be known, her family and friends have shed light on the 32-year-old woman’s state of mind leading up to the killings.
Cliff Harshman, the 32-year-old woman’s husband of five years, told the Cowboy State Daily that his wife had been suffering from postpartum depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Cliff is the father of Harshman’s two youngest daughters. Describing himself as “a mess” in the wake of the killings, Cliff told KTVQ, “People don’t understand how mental illness isn’t just a willpower thing.”
Tranyelle Harshman.
Tranyelle Harshman/Facebook
“My wife was not a monster,” he told the Cowboy State Daily. Cliff also noted that most people don’t understand mental health, emphasizing, “It [was] a chemical imbalance” that his wife had been attempting to treat. (He didn’t go into detail about what Harshman’s treatment plan entailed.)
“We’d been getting her help, and along the way something didn’t work,” Cliff told the outlet.
He described the murders as “so out of character” and “unbelievable,” because, Cliff said, she’d been such a dedicated mom. “She was an incredible mom and she loved those kids,” he told KTVQ.
Brailey and Olivia Blackmer.
Gofundme
“As angry as I may be with her, I still love her — and I still lost her as well,” he said to Cowboy State Daily.
Briana Baker, a longtime friend of Harshman’s, echoed Cliff’s sentiments when she described her friend as “sweet, loving, and funny” to the Scripps News Group.
“Her children were [Harshman’s] main focus in life,” Baker told the outlet. “You never know what someone is struggling with inside of their mind. Tranyelle was not the monster this tragedy makes her seem to be. Her loved ones don’t want her to be remembered for her darkest moments.”
Sage Miears, a former classmate of both Harshman’s and Cliff’s, told Scripps News Group that he wasn’t aware of his one-time friend’s mental health problems: “If she was really battling postpartum depression, that’s a serious thing. People needed to be there for her.”
On Feb. 10, Harshman called 911 around 1:30 p.m. to report a shooting in the household. She told a dispatcher she believed her children were dead, according to a Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office release. She noted that officers would find two of the kids upstairs in their cribs and the other two could be found in a downstairs bedroom.
Harshman also told the dispatcher she “could be found in her upstairs bedroom and that she was going to do the same to herself,” the sheriff’s release states. Though dispatchers pleaded with the woman not to take her own life, she told them it was “too late,” per the release.
GoFundMe pages set up to aid Quinn Blackmer’s family (Harshman’s first husband and the father of her two older kids) and Cliff Harshman’s family had both raised over $100,000 as of Tuesday, Feb. 18.
