In the early morning hours of a June day in York, Pennsylvania, the life of 17-year-old Patrick Winter was tragically cut short. On June 14, 2014, the male teenager was fatally shot while sitting in a parked car in the 300 block of East King Street. The incident occurred shortly before 12:30 a.m., and when York City Police arrived at the scene, they found Patrick, who was pronounced dead right there.
The investigation into the shooting quickly led authorities to a suspect, a 14-year-old named Leonard Anthony Green, III. An arrest warrant was issued, and Green was taken into police custody. Despite his young age, he was charged as an adult with criminal homicide. The community was left to grapple with the reality that a young life had been taken by another so young. Patrick was a student at West York High School, where he played basketball and was looking forward to his senior year. He had also recently graduated from the World A Cuts Barber Institute and was employed there, with dreams of one day working alongside his father who owned the establishment.
The legal proceedings that followed brought some measure of closure to Patrick's family and the community. Leonard Anthony Green, III, who was 17 at the time of his sentencing, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder. In March 2017, a York County Court of Common Pleas judge sentenced him to a lengthy prison term for the shooting death of Patrick Winter. The sentence handed down was 22 years and 10 months to 47 years in state prison, marking the culmination of a case that had deeply affected the York community.
