Mass shooting at Buford's Backyard Beer Garden in Austin leaves 3 dead, 14 injured

An Austin police officer guards the scene on West 6th Street at West Avenue after a shooting on Sunday, March 1, 2026.
Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman

Three people are dead and 14 others injured following a mass shooting outside Buford's Backyard Beer Garden on West Sixth Street in downtown Austin in the early hours of Sunday morning. Among the dead is the suspected gunman, who was shot by officers.

Buford's Backyard Beer Garden is an Austin bar that opened on West Sixth Street in 2017. The space formerly housed Steampunk Saloon, which opened in 2015, and the popular restaurant, Opal's Divine's, for 13 years before that. The bar is designed with an open-air format. It has a large wraparound patio upstairs as well as a downstairs patio that faces the street. According to the city tourism website Visit Austin, the bar's capacity is 700.

The bar is located at 700 W. Sixth St. in downtown Austin.

Buford's caters to a 21-and-up crowd. The bar is popular among students and alumni of the University of Texas at Austin.

Although bars in the area draw large crowds, Sixth Street west of Congress Avenue has never been blocked to vehicular traffic on the weekends. For years, East Sixth Street, the section of the road that falls between Congress Avenue and Interstate 35 was blocked to create pedestrian zones from Thursday through Sunday nights. The street was reopened to vehicles with rubber curbs and fencing to protect pedestrians in January 2025. In March 2025, Austin police said crime on East Sixth Street dropped after the change.

“We return all the calls (to the media), but (sharing information) is not something appropriate to do while the investigation takes place,” Buford's owner Bob Woody told the Statesman Sunday. “We have to let them do what they’re doing first.”

As for when Buford's is expected to reopen, Woody said that will be dictated by the investigation.

“The police will make that decision, and we do not pressure them or ask for information about it,” he said.