[8] After the Nevada State Prison warden, George W. Cowing, was unable to find five men to form a firing squad,[4] a shooting machine was requisitioned and built to carry out the execution.

[5] Gregovich, who also went by the surname Greggory,[9] was a fellow Serb from Castellastva, (now Petrovac), who was handling the cases of other Serbian miners who had died in the fire.

[6][5] Mircovich, who was unfamiliar with the probate laws in Nevada,[8] began cursing Gregovich and Sanders because he was frustrated over being unable to take sole control of the estate.

[5] In the early morning of May 14, 1912, Gregovich was at the Tonopah and Goldfield train depot to collect a grocery bill and had a man called J. R. Masterson in conversation.

Deputy Sheriff William Walker immediately apprehended Mircovich, who told him that the murder weapon was his and that Gregovich had taken his money.

[5] At the grand jury hearing on the next day, Nye County Judge Mark R. Averill denied bail, as Mircovich's case involved capital murder.

George B. Thatcher was Mircovich's court-appointed attorney, but had to leave town on June 1, 1912, for the Democratic State Convention in Fallon.

In his closing statement Sanders challenged the all-male jury to have the "manhood" to "defend the law of my country and its liberty-loving people" or else "we might just as well dynamite this old courthouse.

At the urging of the Mormon population,[11] the Nevada Legislature passed a statute in 1910 that became effective in January 1911,[12] which allowed condemned prisoners to choose between execution by shooting or hanging.

[8] Cowing was faced with a predicament in meeting the scheduled execution date of August 29, 1912, because he was unable to find five marksmen willing to participate in a firing squad.

[14][15] The 1000-pound (450 kg) execution machine, which was called the "shooting gallery of steel", included three Savage Model 1899 .30-30 caliber rifles with Maxim silencers.

[16] On May 13, 1913, Prison Chaplain Lloyd B. Thomas of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Carson City, Nevada, made an unsuccessful appeal for commutation on Mircovich's behalf with the Board of Pardons.

[5] The "shooting machine" was designed to be loaded with two lethal rounds and a blank cartridge, each connected to a coiled spring mechanism.

[5] In a 1915 report to the Nevada Legislature, Dickerson stated that despite his personal reservations, "executions by shooting are a trifle less barbarous than by hanging and have the further merit of eliminating many of the possibilities of bungling."

The rifles from the machine were found during an inventory of the prison armory in June 1977 and were donated to the Nevada State Museum in Carson City.