David Christian, an 18-year-old White / Caucasian male, was fatally shot on August 24, 2015, while visiting a friend’s home in west Phoenix near 75th Avenue and Indian School Road. He was at the house when a firearm being handled inside the home discharged, and responding officers found him dead from a gunshot wound when they arrived at the scene.
Public case listings and memorial pages describe him as a young man from the greater Phoenix/Glendale area, and the incident is consistently recorded as a firearm death that occurred in Phoenix on that date.
According to contemporaneous reporting, the shooting happened inside his friend’s residence, where a small group of teens or young adults were present and a handgun was being handled. At some point, the gun went off and the single shot struck Christian, fatally wounding him. Early coverage indicated that investigators were treating the incident as a possible homicide while they pieced together how the weapon had been obtained, who had been handling it, and whether the account of an accidental discharge was consistent with the physical evidence at the scene.
Phoenix police quickly identified Christian’s friend, 19-year-old Marcus Kennedy, as the person who had been in control of the gun when it fired. He told officers that he had dropped the firearm onto the floor and that it discharged when it hit, sending the round that struck Christian. Kennedy was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter in connection with the death, reflecting investigators’ view that, even if the shooting was not intentional, his handling of the weapon could constitute criminal negligence.
The case moved forward through the Maricopa County courts over the following months. Ultimately, Kennedy entered a guilty plea to a charge of negligent homicide in Christian’s death, formally acknowledging that his conduct with the gun caused his friend’s killing through criminal negligence rather than premeditated intent. In March 2016, a judge sentenced Kennedy to five years in state prison for the offense, a term reported as the outcome of the plea agreement in the case. With that conviction and sentence, authorities treated the shooting as a resolved criminal case rather than an unsolved homicide.
Online memorial and case pages preserve details about Christian’s life and how he was remembered. Loved ones described him as someone who loved skating and worked at a local skating rink, and case summaries note that he was also known by the nickname “DAC.” These tributes place his death within both the local community’s memory and broader compilations of gun-violence victims in Arizona, where his name remains listed alongside others killed by firearms on August 24, 2015.
