Harrison Carpenter, a 37-year-old male from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, died in the early hours of February 12, 2022, after a shooting inside an apartment building on Morse Avenue in Simpson, just outside Carbondale. Police were called around 2:30 a.m. after reports that two men were fighting and that one of them might have a gun. When officers entered the apartment, they found Kevin Bowan of Fell Township with his hands up, with the gun nearby.
Authorities said Carpenter had been shot during the confrontation, and his death was ruled a homicide.
Investigators identified Kevin Bowan as the man who shot Carpenter, and news reports said Bowan admitted to shooting him. At first, the case remained under investigation with no immediate homicide charge filed. The central question became why the fight escalated and whether the shooting could be prosecuted as a criminal homicide. In March 2022, Lackawanna County District Attorney Mark Powell announced that the shooting was ruled self-defense, saying the facts did not support a homicide charge against Bowan.
Although Bowan was not charged with murder or homicide in Carpenter’s death, he still faced criminal charges because he was legally barred from possessing firearms due to a prior felony drug conviction. Authorities said the gun used in the fatal shooting was a Glock 23, and Bowan was charged with illegal possession of firearms after the incident. His father, David Bowan of Simpson, was also charged after police said he gave Kevin Bowan the gun despite knowing or having reason to know Kevin could not legally possess it.
The punishment that followed centered on the firearms violations rather than a homicide conviction. Kevin Bowan was sentenced to serve seven to 20 years in state prison for illegally possessing the gun he used when he fatally shot Carpenter. David Bowan later pleaded guilty to illegally supplying two guns to his son and was sentenced by Lackawanna County Judge Margaret Bisignani Moyle to nine to 18 months of house arrest. The available reporting does not show any conviction for murder or manslaughter in Carpenter’s death; instead, the official outcome described in the sources was a self-defense determination paired with firearms convictions and sentencing tied to the weapon.
