On the evening of February 26, 2019, a call came in to Rapid City police about a young man who had just been shot. The wounded teen was already being rushed through town inside a vehicle, headed for Rapid City Regional Hospital, with the people around him trying to keep him alive long enough to reach the doors. Emmanuel Joseph Hinton, 17, a White/Caucasian male, died after the gunshot wound, and investigators quickly focused on a narrow stretch of northeast Rapid City—an alley behind the 700
block of Blaine Avenue—where witnesses said the shooting had unfolded just before 8 p.m.
According to early police accounts, Hinton had been inside a car when the occupants made contact with two men standing in the alley. Something in that brief encounter turned predatory: investigators believed it was an attempted robbery, and witnesses reported that one of the men produced a handgun and fired into the vehicle, striking Hinton. As the car fled the alley, the two men reportedly disappeared on foot, leaving behind the chaos of the moment and a mortally injured teenager on the way to the hospital.
Within hours, police said they had identified and detained two suspects: Andre Martinez and Cole Waters, both 19 and from Rapid City. Waters was taken into custody voluntarily, while Martinez was arrested at his residence after a brief callout involving the Rapid City/Pennington County Special Response Team. At that stage, authorities said homicide and robbery charges were pending as the investigation continued to solidify what had happened in the alley.
As the case moved through court, prosecutors described the shooting as part of a drug-robbery plot centered on a small marijuana deal. In court filings later summarized in federal litigation, two competing narratives emerged about who drove the plan and how the gun came to be used, but both accounts converged on the same outcome: Waters was the one holding the handgun when it discharged and struck Hinton in the head during the attempted theft. In a report on a later plea change, prosecutors said Martinez devised the robbery plan and recruited Waters; court documents described the meeting in the alley, and Waters later claimed the gun fired accidentally when his arm became caught in the vehicle door as it pulled away.
Both Martinez and Waters ultimately pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter as part of a deal with prosecutors, with sentencing set for December 16. Reports of the final punishment vary in public summaries: an Associated Press account said a judge sentenced each man to 65 years in prison, while later federal court records describing Martinez's custody term characterize his state sentence as 75 years.
