Twelve hours after his wife shot her four children and herself, Cliff Harshman found himself sitting in a hospital waiting room in Billings, Montana.
Tranyelle Harshman, 32, lay in her hospital bed, unconscious under a heated blanket the night of Feb. 10.
At 1:30 that afternoon, she’d called 911 from her home in Byron, Wyoming, to say that her four daughters had “been shot,” and to tell law enforcement where they could find the girls throughout the home. She then shot herself.
Her husband Cliff had been working in Southern California for a natural gas company at the time of the shooting. He rushed homeward as soon as he got the news, then joined his wife in Billings.
By 1 a.m. Feb. 11, Cliff was numb.
A male intensive-care-unit doctor approached Cliff in the waiting room outside Tranyelle’s room to say she wasn’t going to make it.
But, the doctor continued, medical professionals planned to keep Tranyelle alive throughout that day so they could prepare her to give her heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and spleen to five people in desperate need of organ donations.
All Cliff could do was let the words wash over him, he told Cowboy State Daily in a Friday interview at a coffee shop in Powell, Wyoming.
He made a feeble peace with the news that his wife of almost five years was going to die, then trudged to her bedside and grabbed her hand, which felt searing from being under the heated blanket.
“I sat and wept. And I cried to God: ‘Please forgive her. Help me forgive her,’” Cliff recalled. “I lost my best friend. My kids. Everything.”
Cliff’s stepdaughter Brailey, 9, died on scene, along with his two young daughters Brooke — who was almost 3 — and Jordan, who was on the younger side of 2.
His other stepdaughter Olivia, 7, was rushed to care in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she died Saturday after pulling through a brain surgery earlier that week.
If there’s a tragic symmetry to Tranyelle’s organs having saved five people hours after she shot five people, including herself, it didn’t fully hit Cliff until he told that part of his story out loud Friday, he said.
Carefully, Cliff tried to recall important details from the past five years of Tranyelle’s life. He did so in the hopes that it would reveal some important truths, and inspire people to look after one another and show kindness to people who are struggling, he said.
‘Instant’
Cliff knew Tranyelle when they attended Powell High School, but she was a couple grades older than he and they weren’t close. And he was “ornery,” the type people warned her about, he said, laughing through his tears.
She married Quinn Blackmer and had Brailey and Olivia with him. By early 2020, the pair were going through a divorce.
Cliff worked out of town at that time, so he’d crash at his cousin’s house during some of his brief stints in his hometown of Powell. On one such visit, he was recovering from COVID, and oddly, the only thing he could keep down all week was tequila.
Cliff’s cousin’s girlfriend had a friend over: Tranyelle. She greeted Cliff with a hug and a “Hi, how are you?” he recalled.
Their connection was instant. They married that July.
Cliff started raising the two older girls. He and Tranyelle went through a miscarriage in 2021, then the pair had Brooke in February 2022.
Brooke suffered severe food allergies and couldn’t nurse. Tranyelle was wracked with postpartum depression.
Weeks later, she was pregnant again with Jordan, who would become the only blonde — besides her dad — in the family of redheads.
Tranyelle’s postpartum depression wouldn’t go away, Cliff said.
Though she could have breastfed Jordan, who had an appetite like a “garbage pit,” the mother struggled with the overstimulation and claustrophobic sense it gave her, her husband added.
He said she was also suffering from a past traumatic event caused by someone outside her family, which Cliff would only describe privately.
The family also struggled with a custody battle and financial hardships. Cliff’s work in the fluctuating gas industry was erratic. Over the winter, Tranyelle got a job in Powell, but the work environment wasn’t good for her and caused friction between the two, Cliff said.
Though the two dads were locked in a custody battle then, they have come to lean on each other in the wake of this tragedy, both Quinn Blackmer and Cliff Harshman have told Cowboy State Daily.
Ketamine
Meanwhile, Tranyelle’s depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and postpartum depression were no match for the various treatments she tried over the years, Cliff said.
“It was trial and error. It’s always trial and error with depression,” he said. “Sometimes (treatments) work and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes when they don’t, they do the exact opposite, and it’s drastic.”
Tranyelle had been on an emotional roller coaster for a long time, he said. They tried counseling and medication; they interwove holistic herbal and vitamin supplements into the mix.
For Cliff, the vitamins were one of the several, almost undetectable, “little lights” scattered in the darkness. They made her organs suitable for donation, he said.
Around last fall Tranyelle took Prazocin, a sleep aid, to combat her nightmares, Cliff recalled. She gave that up over the winter because it reacted poorly with her system.
Then she tried ketamine, which she was taking in the days leading up to the tragedy, her husband said.
Cliff hesitated to discuss his wife’s ketamine prescription publicly, because he said the drug can be “amazing” and has helped people bounce back from trauma.
Ketamine is a rapid-acting dissociative anesthetic. It’s been used as a battlefield anesthetic because it can help wounded soldiers disassociate from their pain without depriving them of their consciousness, says a 2016 study examining the ethical implications of prescribing the drug.
Common side-effects can include hallucinations, delirium and irrational behaviors, the study says. Some psychiatrists prescribe it off-label to treat depression.
The Last Time
Cliff was home throughout the winter when his work slowed down. When he got the chance to go back into the field Feb. 7, he was excited.
“I was like… yeah — go back to providing, to feel successful for my family again,” he said. “But it was at the wrong time. I needed to be home.”
A couple days before he left, Cliff lay in bed next to Tranyelle. They held each other and talked about their various emotional scars, said they hoped they could use all the trauma to grow closer.
But when he did leave, it was on a tense note, Cliff recalled.
“I live with an immense amount of guilt for things that weren’t said the night before,” he said. “I could have told her how much I loved her… could have told her how much she meant to me.”
‘Check On People’
Cliff remembers Tranyelle as a fiercely devoted mother and a loving wife. He showed Cowboy State Daily videos of her coddling their children, and photos of the family having fun together.
He’s angry and bitter that she killed her children.
Yet he wondered aloud if that was her irrational way of keeping them from the world, which she’d found so painful.
He urges people to take care of one another.
“Be more compassionate. Check on people,” he said.
As for postpartum depression, he characterized it as a “nightmare” and said people don’t talk openly about it enough. He said he wishes doctors would warn people about it far in advance of childbirth.
A coworker has organized a GoFundMe account to help Cliff deal with funeral and other expenses, and to let him focus on grieving. Another GoFundMe surfaced during Olivia’s health battle to pay toward her medical expenses.
Tranyelle Harshman (Courtesy: Facebook)
Breathing
Cliff told Cowboy State Daily in an earlier interview that his focus has been on getting from one breath to the next.
Tranyelle’s sister has been helping him shoulder the many logistics of the tragedy, such as funeral preparations. Cliff’s sister and brother were spending time with him Friday.
Also that morning, Cliff went inside his house in Byron for the first time since the shooting. The house sits in a small circular neighborhood peering out at the mountains through some tightknit winter trees. He and Tranyelle fell in love with it when they bought it in late 2023.
But on Friday — Valentine’s Day — it was a shell.
Law enforcement and cleaning crews had removed the girls’ cribs and any toys and clothing that had been bloodied.
It was a kind gesture of them, said Cliff. But met with empty rooms, he scrambled to find anything that still smelled of his babies and his wife.
Eventually he did. He found a sweater Tranyelle had worn for a couple of days and a set of little girls’ jammies that, mercifully, the mother had not yet put in the laundry.
“What I wouldn’t have given to walk into that house and see them,” said Cliff. “I’d give away everything that I have — and I have so much now — just to have it back to normal.”
Cliff hadn’t set foot in a church for 10 years before this incident and described himself as not very religious.
But now his faith is all he has to pull him through, he said.
“I have to be faithful through this,” said Cliff. “Otherwise I don’t find an existence.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
