At 26 years old, David Alexander Valencia, a White/Caucasian male from Gillette, Wyoming, had built a life that stretched far beyond the town where he was born. Born on July 24, 1996, in Gillette to Leigh Ann Black and Thomas Valencia, he was the youngest of three children in a close-knit family that would later be shattered by his sudden death. He grew up in the community, graduated from Campbell County High School in 2014, and carried with him a creative, restless spirit that showed up in
everything he touched.
From an early age, David gravitated toward music and art. Friends and family remembered how he could lose himself for hours in his guitar, treating music as a kind of refuge and safe place when the world felt heavy. He loved video games and superheroes, painted and drew on anything he could find, and left behind sketches and designs that showed both his sense of humor and his introspective side. In the last few years of his life, he took that creative energy on the road, traveling the West Coast with his dog, Molly, working on farms, turning wrenches, and doing construction jobs while dreaming about buying land in California and homesteading there. Everywhere he went, according to those who knew him, he collected new friends who came to think of him as family.
In December 2022, David came back to Gillette to visit home, a brief pause in his wandering plans that no one imagined would be permanent. A memorial fundraiser later described how, in the “wee hours of the morning” on Friday, December 16, his life was “taken” in what loved ones called a “senseless tragedy,” language that captured the shock of losing someone so young and open-hearted without offering any easy explanation.
What is known about that night comes mainly from law-enforcement and local news reports. In the early hours of December 16, shortly after 2:40 a.m., Gillette police officers responded to reports of a gunshot on East Laurel Street. When they arrived, they found David on the ground, suffering from a gunshot wound to the head. Emergency medical personnel rushed him to Campbell County Health, where efforts to save him failed and he was pronounced dead. The Campbell County Coroner's Office identified him publicly later, and an autopsy was scheduled for the following week as investigators tried to untangle how a quiet Gillette street had turned into the scene of a fatal shooting.
Different public notices and memorials struggled to describe what had happened. Some death-notice aggregators summarized the event as David dying at Campbell County Health following an “inconclusive” handgun accidental discharge, suggesting that a firearm went off in circumstances that were not clearly intentional but also not fully understood. A national gun-violence memorial site listed him among those “lost to gun violence” on December 16, 2022, in Gillette, placing his photo alongside thousands of other victims and linking to the brief local news story about the shooting. Taken together, these fragments paint a picture not of a resolved case, but of a single gunshot whose exact nature—accident, negligence, or something darker—remained publicly unsettled.
In the days that followed, the official line was that the circumstances of David's death were under investigation, with no immediate clarity offered to the community beyond the promise of an autopsy and continued police work. Available public records and subsequent coverage do not show that any suspect was named or that any arrests, criminal charges, trials, or convictions related to his death were ever reported in the press. The story of what happened on East Laurel Street in those early morning hours thus stops, at least in the public record, with a young man taken to a hospital and a case left without a publicly documented resolution.
While investigators worked in the background, David's family and friends tried to fill the silence with memories instead of answers. His obituary described a son and brother who cooked elaborate meals for those he loved, took pride in every dish he served, and poured his affection into animals, art, and the earth he hoped one day to farm. A memorial service was held on January 7, 2023, at the Prairie Sky venue outside Gillette, inviting anyone who knew him to share happy stories or even play a song in his honor, a final gathering shaped around the music and community that had defined his life. An online fundraiser organized in his memory helped his family with funeral costs and spoke of a man who would “give the shirt off his back, even if it's the only one he had,” a line that captured the generosity people remembered long after the sirens and police lights on East Laurel Street were gone.
