Jay Ostrem said little in his initial appearance at a Clay County courthouse on Wednesday afternoon, a day after he was charged with three counts of first-degree murder in a triple homicide in Centerville, South Dakota, the small town where he once served as mayor.

Ostrem, 64, appeared before Judge Kasey Sorenson without an attorney, though he filed paperwork to be provided with a court-appointed attorney. He did not enter a plea during the hearing.

As Sorenson asked Ostrem if he understood the charges of murder filed against him regarding the deaths of Paul Frankus, Zach Frankus and Timothy Richmond, crying could be heard from some in the courtroom’s audience.

The prosecution team said they intended to bring the case before a grand jury, and Sorenson set a circuit court arraignment hearing for 3 p.m. June 20 in McCook County.

Court documents say police received a call at 9:44 p.m. Monday night from Zach Frankus, saying that his brother Paul Frankus had been shot and killed with a shotgun at a Centerville residence. Zach Frankus eventually told a dispatcher that he too had been shot, and stopped speaking soon afterward.

Authorities responding to the scene reported seeing Ostrem leaving the home identified as the scene of the shooting.

When he eventually obeyed commands to lay on the ground, officers found him bleeding from the left hand and smelling of alcohol, with a .380 handgun and AR-style rifle, as well as spent shotgun shell casings and a spent rifle casing.

Paul Frankus, Zach Frankus and Richmond were found dead inside the home.

Documents say Ostrem’s wife told police when they contacted her that Paul Frankus had forcibly kissed her and exposed his genitals to her while they were drinking on May 23.

She told police that she had informed Ostrem of this on the night of May 27, leading to him “raging out of the house.” She told police he did not say where he was going and that he had no weapons, though she said he may have had weapons in his vehicle.

Who is Jay Ostrem?

With 20 years of law enforcement experience, Ostrem played a role in helping the city overcome state-level scrutiny when the city’s police chief at the time faced an investigation for a crime not named publicly in 2006 by working for the city police department on weekends after a time when the town had little to no law enforcement, the archives show. That former police chief, Nolan Clark, later pleaded guilty to DUI in 2007 and Ostrem stopped taking those weekend shifts then.

Ostrem, a Gillette, Wyoming transplant, was also a Turner County Sheriff’s Office investigator in 2007 and a deputy in 2010, according to Argus Leader archives. He assisted in the 2010 trial of Ethan Johns, who was convicted of killing sheriff’s deputy Chad Mechels and sentenced to life in prison.

He was also at the center of a two-year legal battle for Centerville between 2010 and 2012, when the city’s former police chief filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Ostrem, who was the former mayor by that time. He was mayor in 2010, archives show.

The two settled the lawsuit, but the former chief, Rachel Kopman, had alleged she was “repeatedly inundated with sexually inappropriate comments and remarks from Ostrem,” during her tenure. Neither commented about the settlement at the time, Argus Leader archives show.

His law enforcement certification expired in 2016, reported South Dakota Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Former South Dakota mayor charged in triple homicide appears in court