Gianni Scott Corsentino, 18, male, of mixed white and African American heritage, had just crossed two bright thresholds—his June 9 Liberty High School graduation and his June 18 birthday—when the night of June 25, 2016, turned toward tragedy. Near midnight on June 26, he and two friends pulled into the Maverik Adventure's First Stop at the 10400 block of South Bermuda Road, just off Cactus Avenue in south Las Vegas.
They were riding in the silver Chevy Cruze his grandfather had given him as a graduation gift, pausing on the way to meet up with friends. Inside the car, music and plans mixed with the easy fatigue of a long summer evening. Outside, surveillance cameras watched a gas-station lull stretch on.
What happened next was quick and senseless. One of Gianni's companions, Gerald “Gunna” Fuller, spent an extended time inside the store, phoning relatives. According to testimony later aired in court, he had grown paranoid that the others might rob him and called his uncle, Adrian Johnson. Moments after midnight, Johnson walked up to the Cruze and opened fire with a. 45-caliber handgun into the cabin where the teens sat. Gianni, at the wheel, tried to back the car away but was shot in the head at close range; his friends, Robert Ortiz in the front passenger seat and Tai-Ree Williams in the back, were struck multiple times yet survived. As chaos spilled across the forecourt—one friend running for help, another hiding outside—the shooters fled in a waiting pickup.
The grief that followed rippled through a family that had raised Gianni to aim high—on the baseball diamond, in the classroom, and in life. His grandparents, Tony and Jeanie Lato, who had brought him up in Las Vegas, spoke publicly in the days after the shooting about the respectful, driven young man whose future included a baseball scholarship to the Community College of Rhode Island. Hundreds gathered for his funeral the following week. In the months that followed, his family pressed for answers while detectives pursued leads across state lines.
Within weeks, local outlets reported that two suspects—Fuller, 18, and Johnson, 29—had been identified and arrested in Dallas, Texas, pending extradition to Nevada. Court narratives later described a winding path: Fuller was taken into custody first, while Johnson ultimately was located by the FBI in Dallas and returned to Las Vegas by early 2017. A Clark County grand jury indicted both men in October 2016 on conspiracy to commit murder, murder with the use of a deadly weapon, and two counts of attempted murder with a deadly weapon.
Years of hearings, fits and starts, and delays ended in two very different resolutions. Fuller entered an Alford plea to conspiracy, voluntary manslaughter with a deadly weapon, and attempted murder with a deadly weapon; in April 2022 he was sentenced to a term of eight to twenty years in prison. Johnson took his case to trial. In November 2022 a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit murder, and two counts of attempted murder with a deadly weapon. On February 7, 2023, a judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a punishment prosecutors argued matched the “absolutely senseless” nature of the attack.
Across the long arc from the gas-station pavement to the courtroom, the picture that emerged was stark: a routine stop, a spiraling fear, a call that summoned an older relative, and a hail of bullets that cut short a young life just eight days after his eighteenth birthday. Gianni's grandparents, who had once posed with him before prom and watched him lean against his new Cruze with pride, carried his memory into every hearing, every statement, and finally into a verdict and sentence that brought a measure of justice, even as it could never bring him home.
