COPAKE, N.Y.

Late in the afternoon, a light snow falling like frozen mist, the landscape of small dairy farms, grain silos and rolling fields is a study in gray and white, beautiful, cold and ghostly.

In this town, tipping downhill since before the old movie theater burned down in 1990, almost as many businesses, it seems, are vacant as are open. The bulletin board by the antique clock and modest war memorial in the small traffic circle features one pressing item. “Help Decide the Future of Copake!!” it reads. The meeting date was Nov. 7.

Still, a long, cold winter, a farm village fallen on hard times, is the backdrop, not the explanation, for what happened to Dean Pierson on Jan. 21. Sometime after finishing the morning milking, Mr. Pierson, 59, a dairy farmer who grew up on High Low Farm on Weed Mine Road in Columbia County, which his father bought when he was an infant, did something no one will ever entirely explain. He took a small-caliber rifle and went through the barn he built about a decade ago methodically shooting all 51 of his milking cows in the head.

He left a note on the front door that warned the reader not to go inside but to call the police. Then he sat down in a chair and killed himself with a single rifle shot to the chest. He left behind a short suicide note scrawled on scratch paper that made reference to his depression over personal and financial issues. He expressed his love for his family but said he was “overwhelmed.”