Danielle Nichole Martin was 43, a White woman, when her life ended on the afternoon of January 28, 2018, at a home north of Rock Springs, Wyoming. Deputies were called out after a shooting was reported, and when they arrived they found her dead from a gunshot wound to the head. The man at the scene, Stephen Jeffrey Taranovich of Rock Springs, was taken into custody and initially held on a manslaughter charge as investigators began piecing together what happened inside the house.
According to court accounts later summarized in reporting, Martin and Taranovich had gone that day to the residence on Pyramid Drive, where a friend, Stephen Ray Kiskis, was also present. Kiskis told detectives the pair went into a bedroom where, in his view, they typically went to smoke drugs, and he eventually followed them in. He described a tense, cramped moment: Martin kneeling near the foot of the bed, Taranovich seated across from her with a handgun in his lap, the barrel oriented in her direction. Martin complained that she wanted to go home, and then the gun discharged. Kiskis said he believed the shot was accidental, but he also told investigators he saw Taranovich shoot her.
Taranovich’s own explanation, as relayed in court-document reporting, was that he had been using “dope” before the shooting and that he had pulled a. 40-caliber Smith & Wesson from his back pocket and started taking it apart to clean it with a cloth. He said he reassembled the weapon without realizing a live round remained in the chamber, and that when he pulled the trigger to release tension, it fired while pointed toward Martin—an outcome he claimed was unintentional. As the case moved forward, prosecutors formally charged him with involuntary manslaughter, and the court set a $600,000 cash-or-surety bond.
The legal stakes climbed higher when prosecutors filed notice seeking a habitual-criminal enhancement, citing prior felony convictions and warning that, if applied, it could expose him to a life sentence. A judge later found probable cause to advance the involuntary-manslaughter case into district court, keeping the bond in place as the prosecution framed the shooting as reckless conduct rather than a harmless mistake.
In the end, the case did not go to a full trial. Taranovich pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, and on October 9, 2018, a district judge sentenced him to 40 to 50 years in prison for Martin’s death—closing the courtroom chapter of a shooting that began, by the accounts on file, in a small bedroom with drugs, a handgun, and a single pull of the trigger.
