EXTRA: Shooting at In-N-Out, Twin Falls, ID
Here's what we know at publication time about the In-N-Out shooting in Twin Falls, Idaho. | As of ~noon ET on 8/2/2026
Everything below is about a day old, and the odds are high that at least some of it is wrong. The injured count has already changed multiple times, nobody has been named — not the gunman, not the dead, not the man with the pistol — and the police haven’t said how the gunman died. Citation links are in the text. You can see who said what and weigh it yourself.
Twin Falls is a city of about 56,000, roughly 130 miles southeast of Boise. The In-N-Out on its north side had been open eight days — the fourth in the state — and it sat in a shopping district with a Petco, a Best Buy, an IHOP and a Taco Bell in it, near the Magic Valley Mall and the city’s visitor center. Police Chief Matthew Hicks called it “one of the busiest locations in all of southern Idaho” (NYT). Lane Koehn, a 34-year-old construction worker and a Magic Valley native (AP, KTVB), put it more plainly: “There’s a lot of traffic around there.” (NYT)
At 2:29 yesterday afternoon, Twin Falls police got a call about an active shooter. The call put him inside the dining area, and the gunfire spilled outside from there (NYT). Hicks said afterward that there were “literally hundreds of people that were in the area of the restaurant at the time.” (KTVB)
Nayeli Rodriguez, 40, was inside with her daughters waiting on food when she heard shots from the kitchen and an employee told everyone to get down. An older man tried to shield her and the girls, and they were among the last out. “We were trying to get as far as we could and some angels let us in their car,” she told the AP by text. “I left my car there in the parking lot” (AP). Haley Dodaro, 43, was in the drive-thru line with her mother and saw people running across the road and workers bolting out of the building before a man in a reflective vest directing traffic told them what was happening. “So that’s when we knew there was a shooting,” she said. “People were running out crying and screaming. It was very scary.” (AP)
Koehn was driving home from work and stopped at a light when a man came out of the drive-thru with an AR-style rifle (AP, Newsweek). He described him as young — a teenager, he thought (NYT, Newsweek) — pale, with glasses and black hair, carrying what looked like a semi-automatic rifle (KTVB). Then he started shooting toward the traffic at the light.
“I think it was random, the way the kid was firing,” Koehn told the New York Times. “You can tell he was panicking. He was not very calm and collected, running and slinging his rifle around firing.” (NYT)
The gunman was thirty or forty feet off to Koehn’s right, and Koehn was watching bullets go into a car a few feet ahead of his own. “I thought there was a good chance I was gonna take a round,” he said. “I was kinda hunkering down.” (KTVB)
That’s when a man with a pistol started firing at him (AP). Twitter is naming him Jordan Salinas, though I have no independent corroboration of that at the moment.
He was in the In-N-Out drive-thru (KTVB). The Times has Koehn saying he saw “another shooter, ‘an older gentleman,’ exchanging fire with his handgun and appearing to force the younger shooter to run for cover.” (NYT) KTVB got the concrete version out of him a day later: “And the last I saw the kid, he was hiding behind the In-N-Out sign … and he’s exchanging gunfire with this, this other person with his handgun in the drive-through.” And: “They were both running around trying to dodge bullets.” (KTVB)
Koehn “said this man was shooting from a distance, but he might have saved lives because he distracted the shooter enough to get him to stop firing into traffic.” (KTVB)
To be clear, it doesn’t look like the GGWAG stopped the shooter per se. What the record describes is a man in a drive-thru who put himself between a rifle and a line of cars and gave the gunman something else to shoot at for a while. Redirection and delay. Hero nevertheless, and probably saved lives.
How much shooting there was is a moving figure, too. Koehn told the AP on Saturday that the gunman fired at least three or four rounds and that it wasn’t clear anyone in particular was being targeted (AP). By the time KTVB sat him down, the number had gone up considerably: “And a lot of shots. We’re not talking five shots. It’s a couple of magazines. You know, he would empty one here and reload.” He described the gunman firing into vehicles and, in his words, “Send a magazine through the drive-through window.” (KTVB) Two other witnesses told the same station that shots went through the drive-thru window (KTVB). The last Koehn saw of him, he was running down the road toward the visitor center with the shooting still going on (KTVB). The Chamber of Commerce says shots were fired at the visitor center as well; it stayed closed through Monday (KTVB).
In the parking lot, the same afternoon, the Good Guy with a Gun story ran the other way.
Dominic Gonzales, 29, was waiting on his sister with their two younger brothers, five and six years old. The family had come to the shopping center to see the new Spiderman movie (NYT). “We were just sitting there, I was playing on my phone when I heard a couple pops and I look up and I see a gentleman walking from a white vehicle to another vehicle with a pistol in his hand,” he told KMVT. The man fired at a vehicle. Gonzales told his brothers to duck, kept track of where the man was, and then threw himself across the front of the car — “just to take up space so if anything did come flying I was there.” (KMVT)
His sister, Jaylyn Sanchez, 20, had ordered and stepped into the restroom when the shooting started. People crowded in around her and tried to barricade the door. When she was told it was safe, she ran out through the drive-thru line and straight into the gunman’s path. “As I was running I faced the shooter head on and he pointed the gun at me,” she said. “I ducked behind a white car just to have some sort of coverage.” (KMVT)
And there, sitting on a gun case beside her, was a pistol.
“I saw a pistol on a gun case — I am guessing was his — I didn’t have anything to protect myself so I grabbed the gun and I pulled it back, it was jammed, so I just felt helpless.” (KMVT)
She got in a vehicle and left. Two pistols in that parking lot, but only one of them worked. Unfortunate.
Koehn pulled into the In-N-Out lot after the shooting moved off and found a group already working on a wounded employee. Somebody in an In-N-Out uniform had dragged another one clear, bleeding from a chest wound (AP) — shot through the back, and it went out through her chest (KTVB). “When I got up there, he got her to the sidewalk. And he is totally hysterical, losing his mind,” Koehn said. “She was shot through the middle of her chest, and in and out of it. And so we’re trying to keep her, wake her back up, block the wound.” (KTVB) A man who said he was a retired paramedic was applying pressure to the wound when the ambulance got there (NYT). The employee, Koehn, and the man with the pistol stayed with her until the paramedics arrived (AP). Then police told Koehn to evacuate, because it wasn’t over yet (AP).
“She was pretty bad off, but I don’t know,” he said. “I hope she made it.” (AP)
The rest of the afternoon belonged to everyone else in that shopping district. Employees at the Mo’ Bettahs across the parking lot locked the doors, moved staff and customers to the back, and sat there for hours while SWAT worked outside (KMVT). Cassidy Ennis, 24, was in the Magic Valley Mall with her mother when it went into lockdown — lights off, people pressed into the corners of stores, police eventually gathering everybody into the food hall. She said it felt like an hour. “Thankful we’re alive,” she said afterward. “I couldn’t ask for anything more.” (NYT) The Perrine Bridge and the roads around the plaza closed and later reopened; a nearby Chick-fil-A shut for the day; officers searched a hotel overlooking the visitor center. St. Luke’s Magic Valley put out a critical alert asking the public to stay away, and wouldn’t discuss patients. Witnesses were taken to the county courthouse to be interviewed and then released — Hicks expected hundreds of them (KTVB, NBC News). “This is the most chaotic scene that many of them will ever have in their careers,” he said of his officers (KTVB).
Now the numbers, which are a mess, and which I can’t really clean up. Better numbers will come.
Three dead is the one figure that has held everywhere. The injured count has fluctuated. Twin Falls public information officer Josh Palmer texted reporters a little after five that two people were hurt and to “expect that number to be higher” (Boise State Public Radio, Idaho Capital Sun); the 5:45 news conference gave the same (KTVB). Police then said at least five (Multiple). By its 11:07 p.m. update the AP had seven, some critically, sourced to a Twin Falls city spokesman (AP) — while KTVB reported that figure as the AP’s and said authorities had not confirmed a number (KTVB). On Sunday morning, the Times had Palmer putting the wounded at five with the final number possibly higher (NYT). KTVB had Palmer, the same Sunday morning, at seven (KTVB). The Wall Street Journal was still on at least five at 10:25 that morning (WSJ). The New York Post put it at two dead and seven wounded in one headline and three dead including the gunman in another (NY Post). KSL’s URL still says three dead and two injured under a headline that says seven.
And whether the three includes the gunman is a question the city itself won’t answer. Palmer told the AP he didn’t know (AP); he couldn’t confirm it for the Journal (WSJ); NBC and CNN both wrote that it wasn’t clear (NBC News, CNN). Saturday evening the police were working with St. Luke’s just to establish how many people had died (NYT). So I’ll leave the arithmetic to the people who can do it, and note only that four incompatible readings of this are in print, from an official whose count went up in one outlet and down in another on the same morning.
One of the dead was an In-N-Out employee. The company’s president, Lynsi Snyder, said so in an overnight Facebook post that opened “We lost one of our beautiful Associates tonight.” (NBC News, NYT)
“She was taking care of our most important asset — our customers, and her life was taken by a disgusting human who doesn’t value the lives of others or his own. … He shot both on our property and off, and ended his life shortly after he took the precious lives of our associate and customers, innocent people who never saw it coming.” (NBC News)
She closed it by saying In-N-Out “will be mourning with the families and praying for them as they tread through a very painful season.” (KTVB) No victim has been named. Next-of-kin notifications were still under way as of the last source I have (Multiple).
Police found the gunman’s body near the restaurant — “nearby on the scene there,” in Hicks’s phrase. It’s not clear how he died. In-N-Out’s statement says he ended his own life (NBC News, KTVB), and Duane Rubink, chief of the neighboring Jerome Police Department, told CNN “It appears there was one shooter who is deceased from a self inflicted gunshot” (CNN). Twin Falls police — the agency actually investigating — have released nothing about cause or manner of death and haven’t confirmed how he died (Multiple). Palmer’s Sunday update said outright that it was still unknown (NYT).
As far as I can see, he hasn’t been identified and no motive has been established. “We are working to try to ascertain his identity and the motivations behind [the shooting] and we’ll be able to figure that out in the next coming days,” Hicks said (Idaho Capital Sun). Meanwhile the department asked people to stop passing around unverified claims about who he was, and Palmer told CNN “I would caution people, we’re seeing a lot of misinformation on social media, so just be cautious.” (Newsweek, CNN)
The same goes for the man possibly named Jordan Salinas, with the pistol. Everything we know comes from Lane Koehn, in three interviews — the AP’s, the Times’s, and KTVB’s. No official source has mentioned him. CNN went into that same parking lot and came out with two siblings’ first-person accounts and nothing about him at all. The Chamber of Commerce thanked “the individuals who bravely provided aid and comfort to those in need,” which names nobody and doesn’t say anyone was armed (KTVB). We have video evidence that someone did take on the shooter, but be a little careful with the details and the name.
Sources
Local news
KTVB
‘Shooting at random’: Witness saw Twin Falls In-N-Out shooter firing into traffic and drive-thru window (The full Koehn interview)
Twin Falls police responding to active shooter near In-N-Out (The fullest local running account; the Hicks quotes nobody else carried, the Chamber statement, the visitor center, the courthouse staging; links the full 5:45 news conference)
What we know about the shooter in the deadly Twin Falls In-N-Out shooting (The only outlet to flag the seven-injured figure as unconfirmed by authorities)
What we know about the victims in the Twin Falls In-N-Out shooting (Names none of them; carries Palmer’s Sunday count and Snyder’s closing line)
KMVT
Shooter has been confirmed dead by Twin Falls Police Department (The live night-of file)
Twin Falls community left reeling after In-N-Out shooting (Aftermath; the St. Luke’s alert and the lockdown geography)
Siblings describe sheltering from shooter in restaurant parking lot (The Gonzales and Sanchez interviews, in the original — CNN quotes from these)
Mo’ Bettahs employees describe lockdown during In-N-Out shooting (The only source that mentions SWAT)
James Dawson had the earliest local casualty count and Palmer’s “expect that number to be higher” text.
Twin Falls police respond to active shooter at In-N-Out (Boise State Public Radio)
The Capital Sun ran his piece with the Hicks press-conference quotes and the official reaction statements added.
3 dead, 2 injured in Twin Falls In-N-Out shooting (Idaho Capital Sun; the republication, with the Hicks quotes)
Two more Idaho stations.
Shooting near In-N-Out in Twin Falls (KBOI / CBS2 Boise)
Law enforcement searching for shooting suspect near In-N-Out in Twin Falls (KIVI / Idaho News 6)
National news
Rebecca Boone and Martha Bellisle’s wire story is the spine of everything below it: the first Koehn interview, plus Hicks, Palmer, Dodaro and Rodriguez. NPR carried it verbatim.
3 dead, 2 injured in active shooter incident near Twin Falls In-N-Out, police say (Associated Press, read at KSL.com)
Idaho fast food restaurant shooting leaves 3 dead (NPR’s reprint of the same wire copy)
The New York Times
Shooting at Idaho In-N-Out leaves several dead (The New York Times)
CNN
Idaho shooter found dead near Twin Falls In-N-Out (CNN)
NBC News
3 dead, several injured in shooting at Twin Falls, Idaho, In-N-Out (NBC News)
The Wall Street Journal
Three dead, at least five injured in Idaho shooting at In-N-Out restaurant (The Wall Street Journal)
Newsweek is the only conventional news outlet to build a piece around the armed civilian, working from the Times’s Koehn material and CNN’s Rubink quote. It frames the encounter more strongly in its headline and lede than its own sources do.
Idaho shooting: Man exchanged fire with In-N-Out gunman, witness says (Newsweek)
ABC7 Los Angeles
Idaho police respond to active shooter incident in Twin Falls (ABC7 Los Angeles / KABC)
The New York Post
Three dead, including gunman, after madman opens fire on Idaho In-N-Out (New York Post)
2A / specialist media
Teri Christoph had the specialist pickup, built on the AP account plus the Post’s video description and a viral post. Her rendering of the Post’s Tesla footage says handgun where the Post says rifle.
WATCH: Armed civilian fights it out with Idaho In-N-Out gunman (RedState)