Boise man charged with 2020 shooting at Missionary Training Center

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

Dallin William Litster, 26, has been identified and charged in the 2020 Missionary Training Center shooting.
Litster is accused of firing nine rounds at a security booth, injuring a guard with broken glass.
Prosecutors aim to extradite Litster from Idaho to Utah to face the charges.

PROVO — More than four years after someone fired several rounds at the security booth in front of the Missionary Training Center in Provo, which was occupied at the time by a security guard, the suspected gunman has been identified and charged.

Dallin William Litster, 26, of Boise, was charged Wednesday in Utah's 4th District Court with attempted murder, a first-degree felony; aggravated assault, a third-degree felony; and criminal mischief, a class A misdemeanor.

On Aug. 3, 2020, just before 2:30 a.m., a white or silver older model Subaru sedan pulled up to the MTC entrance at 2005 N. 900 East. Litster got out of the vehicle and fired nine rounds into the occupied security booth, according to charging documents.

Bullet holes are seen in the window of a security booth at the Mission Training Center in Provo, following a shooting Aug. 3, 2020. (Photo: Provo police)

"(The guard) had to jump to the ground to keep from getting shot and (he) was injured by the broken glass. Several of the bullets hit the desk where (he) had been sitting," the charges state.

The Missionary Training Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was vacant of missionaries at the time, due to COVID-19 restrictions. Police released surveillance video of the vehicle a week later in hopes of drumming up leads.

It wasn't until May 2024, however, while Litster was being transported to jail in Twin Falls, Idaho, for an unrelated crime when he "spontaneously stated that he had shot up a booth near the Missionary Training Center in Provo during COVID," the charges allege. Litster claimed it was just "vandalism" and not a drive-by shooting because no one was in the booth.

But as police began to look further into his statement, they discovered Litster was enrolled at Utah Valley University during the fall of 2020, according to charging documents. Several weeks after the shooting, police learned that he moved to Georgia, and later to Idaho.

Provo police tracked down several of Litster's former roommates who told officers Litster "had been very negative about the church and had issues with missionaries and the church before moving out on Aug. 13, 2020," the charges state.

Detectives also confirmed that Litster owned a Subaru at the time. In addition, they listened to a phone call made by Litster while in jail in Idaho to his ex-wife, during which he made statements such as, "The thing is the thing I talked to you about in Utah about how I got in trouble down there or I could about the property damage there," and later stated, "I told you they are trying to frame me for that thing in Utah, they are trying to say it's something it totally wasn't, you know."

Litster remains incarcerated in Twin Falls, Idaho, court documents state. Prosecutors will seek to have him extradited to Utah to face these charges.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.