He liked to provoke classmates.
Long before he picked up a gun and opened fire on Douglas County sheriff’s deputies in his Highlands Ranch apartment, Matthew Riehl was a law student and a lawyer in Wyoming, and many of those who knew him during that time recall an “oddball” who liked to provoke others.
When Riehl attended law school at the University of Wyoming, there were only about 75 students.
“Everybody gets to know each other really well,” said Ember Oakley, now a deputy district attorney in Fremont County, Wyo. “It becomes a world unto itself.”
Oakley has a photograph of Riehl back then attending a pumpkin carving party at her home.
All of the law students in the class got to know Riehl well — too well for Oakley. She said she found Riehl to be sarcastic and provocative. She recalled a ski trip several classmates took to Steamboat Springs. Riehl bluntly refused to pay his portion of the expenses for a condominium and food, even as he continued eating the food. He would often provoke reactions and then wave the victim flag, she said.
On March 24, 2007, Riehl, Oakley and a number of other students met at Shari’s Restaurant in Laramie. They were sitting at a table when Riehl began talking about disemboweling animals and having sex with them. As usual, Riehl was goading his fellow students into a response. When Oakley told him to stop, he threatened to defecate on the floor of her apartment. He kept ignoring Oakley’s demands.
“I grabbed him, dragged him to the floor and put him in a seat at another table. I told him, ‘You’re not sitting at our table,’ ” Oakley said Friday. “He grabbed my wallet and threw it in the street.”
Riehl filed an assault complaint against her the next day, but he later declined to pursue charges.
“That’s his MO, always provoking and maligning,” Oakley said. “He would try to screw you and see what you would do. He was proactively acting like a victim.”
Oakley said Riehl was not popular at the law school because of his sophomoric antics, but he was a good student academically.
After graduation, Riehl went to work for Macpherson Kelly & Thompson in Rawlins. The law firm had been the training ground for a Wyoming Supreme Court judge as well as state and federal judges.
Between 2010 and 2012, Riehl represented clients in federal lawsuits, including defendants Leclair Irrigation District in a lawsuit filed by the Northern Arapaho Tribe. In 2013, Riehl and Tom Thompson represented the mayor of Diamondville, Wyo., and its City Council after a former police chief filed a federal civil lawsuit over his firing. Former Chief Jimmy Hahn said leaders of the southwestern town, population 737 in 2010, wanted to fire him for what he maintained were personal reasons.
Hahn said he will never forget Riehl.
“I thought Diamondville got the right guy to get rid of me,” Hahn said Friday after learning that Riehl had fatally shot Douglas County sheriff’s Deputy Zackari Parrish and wounded four other law enforcement officers and two neighbors on New Year’s Eve morning. SWAT team members killed Riehl after he fired more than 100 gunshots at deputies and police.
“I thought he was just an oddball,” said Hahn, now a part-time officer in Big Piney, Wyo. “He would talk, stop, suck his lip and start talking again.”
It seemed he felt his every word was so important, Hahn said. In a court pleading, the city claimed that they fired Hahn because he had cancer. U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl summarily dismissed Hahn’s case against Diamondville.
But even before the decision, Riehl had left Macpherson Kelly & Thompson and started his own law firm. Thompson did not return several phone calls seeking comment.
Former fellow law students at UW said Riehl struggled as an attorney in part because he was using methamphetamines. Riehl was committed to a Veteran’s Affairs hospital in 2014. He later escaped.
Riehl surrendered his Wyoming law license in November 2016, said Sharon Wilkinson, executive director of the Wyoming State Bar. At the time, Riehl wrote a letter explaining his decision, but Wilkinson said the letter is confidential. He moved to Colorado and sought a license, but UW law school officials did not support his application, Oakley said.
“It makes sense that a lot of his ire was directed toward the law school,” she said.
In late October, Riehl began sending disparaging, nonsensical emails to UW law school professors and Lone Tree police. Riehl created a Facebook account that railed against the university and live-streamed angry screeds on Periscope about a Lone Tree police officer he claimed was dirty.
After the shooting, Oakley has traded phone calls with 10 former law school classmates.
“I was surprised to hear so many of them say that if any of them was going to do someone like that, it would be Riehl,” Oakley said.