Ki'Ziah Cone, 14, a Black female, was found fatally shot on the morning of December 11, 2023, after police were called to an apartment in the 7500 block of Oso Blanca Road in northwest Las Vegas. Officers discovered five people with gunshot wounds; four were pronounced dead at the scene, including Ki'Ziah, her 34-year-old mother, and her 6-year-old sister, while an 11-year-old sibling was rushed to the hospital with critical injuries.
The scene told a swift, harrowing story: a family morning turned to silence, doors opened by worried relatives, and detectives tracing the paths of bullets through rooms that had held ordinary life the day before.
By the next day, the coroner had publicly identified the dead, confirming the children's ages and that each victim died from gunshot wounds to the head. The details carried a stark finality—names, ages, and manner of death—marking the end of a life just beginning for Ki'Ziah and the shattering of the home she shared with her family.
Detectives concluded the killings were part of a murder-suicide carried out by 42-year-old Marvin Ray Patterson, the husband and stepfather in the household, who shot the woman and three children before turning the gun on himself. In the hours around the violence, troubling messages prompted a relative to come looking, a small act of alarm that led to the discovery and the call to police. With the assailant dead at the scene, there were no arrests; the case closed around a single, fatal set of actions and the unanswered questions they left behind.
