Mark W. Dreiman, 19, male, White, was killed the night of September 17, 2016, in south Cheyenne, Wyoming, inside the garage of a home on Drew Court where he had been living with his father. The call for help brought deputies to the residence, but by the time the scene settled into flashing lights and shouted instructions, Dreiman had suffered a single gunshot wound high on his torso—described by investigators as striking the upper chest and lower neck area—and he did not survive.
In the first hours after the shooting, investigators focused on a teenage friend who had been at or near the home that evening. The Laramie County Sheriff’s Office publicly identified an 18-year-old, Austin Daniel as the person they wanted to locate and question, emphasizing in early updates that he was being sought for questioning as they tried to piece together what happened in the garage. For a brief window, the case carried the tense uncertainty of an unfolding manhunt—deputies working leads, the public watching for a name and a face, and a family left with the terrible stillness that follows a sudden death.
Within days, that uncertainty turned into an arrest. Authorities reported that Austin Daniel was taken into custody on September 21, 2016, and the investigation moved from a search to interviews, statements, and charging decisions. Prosecutors filed an involuntary manslaughter case, framing the death not as a planned killing but as a fatal act tied to reckless handling of a firearm—an allegation that still carried the weight of a felony charge and the possibility of a long prison sentence under Wyoming law.
As the case advanced through court, investigators described an encounter that sounded heartbreakingly ordinary right up until it wasn’t: teenagers in a garage, a handgun brought into the space, and a moment of mishandling that could not be taken back. In testimony and charging narratives reported at the time, detectives said Daniel admitted he shot Dreiman and characterized it as accidental, describing a sequence where the magazine had been removed, but a round was still in the chamber—an all-too-common and deadly misunderstanding that can make a gun “feel” unloaded when it is not.
In late September 2016, a judge found enough evidence for the case to proceed to Laramie County District Court. Daniel entered a not guilty plea the following month, and for a while the story held in that uneasy middle ground between accident and accountability, with prosecutors and defense preparing to argue what “reckless” meant in the intimate setting of friends handling a weapon.
Months later, the trajectory shifted. On April 7, 2017, Daniel changed course in court and pleaded guilty to one count of involuntary manslaughter, acknowledging that he shot Dreiman in the Drew Court garage on September 17. Reports of the plea described the courtroom details: the judge, the formal questions, and Daniel’s account of the gun’s magazine being removed—facts that did nothing to soften the final reality that, in a single instant, a young man was gone and another would carry the consequences through the criminal justice system.
