Levi Patrick King died in Riverton, Wyoming, on March 12, 2018. He was Levi Patrick King, a 19-year-old white male.
Late that Monday night, police were called to a home in the 400 block of East Pine Street after a report of a gunshot. When officers arrived, they found King dead from a gunshot wound, and detectives and crime scene personnel began interviewing people at the house and processing the scene through the night.
In the first hours of March 13, Riverton police arrested a friend, Keith Sack of Riverton, on an involuntary manslaughter charge while the department emphasized early on that investigators were not treating the shooting as intentional.
As investigators pieced together what happened inside the house, court documents described a grim kind of preventable moment: several people had been handling a rifle and dry-firing it while testing the trigger mechanism, believing it to be unloaded. Witness statements and physical evidence summarized in a police affidavit said that at some point the rifle was loaded without Sack realizing it; the same affidavit said those present had been drinking while playing with the gun. When Sack later pulled the trigger, the shot struck King, and the case moved forward as a criminal matter rooted in negligence rather than intent.
In the weeks that followed, additional reporting cited officials saying an autopsy found no relevant toxicology in King’s system, and the prosecution of Sack for manslaughter continued. In early 2019, Sack entered a no-contest plea to manslaughter in district court; reports at the time said the plea and his ultimate sentence were still subject to the court’s review of a pre-sentence investigation. Public reporting tied to the case did not describe any other suspects or additional arrests beyond Sack.
