On a Thanksgiving evening in Pueblo, Colorado, a dispute inside a home on Highway 50 East ended in the tragic death of 18-year-old Diana Daughtry. On November 27, 2014, the young woman, who had her whole life ahead of her, was shot and killed. The person who pulled the trigger was her 40-year-old live-in boyfriend, Aaron McDaniel, a man who had been a friend of her family for many years.
In the immediate aftermath, McDaniel’s account of the evening was that he had acted in
self-defense. He told sheriff's deputies that Daughtry had been attacking him with a weapon, leaving him with no choice but to shoot her. Emergency services arrived to find Daughtry with a single, fatal gunshot wound to her head. She was rushed to a local hospital but succumbed to her injuries, dying in the early hours of the following morning. McDaniel, an Army-trained former prison guard, was treated at the scene for the injuries he claimed to have sustained during the altercation.
The days and weeks that followed were filled with anguish and unanswered questions for Diana Daughtry's family. They publicly questioned the plausibility of McDaniel's self-defense claim, finding it difficult to reconcile with the girl they knew and the nature of her fatal injury. Her mother and sister were particularly tormented by the fact that the bullet had struck her between the eyes, a detail that, in their view, did not align with a defensive action. They spoke of their daughter and sister as a shy, kind-hearted animal lover who had dreams of studying insects.
The Pueblo County Sheriff's Office, with assistance from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, conducted an investigation into the shooting. The case was then handed over to the 10th Judicial District Attorney's Office for a review to determine if criminal charges were warranted. In the initial period following Daughtry's death, no arrests were made, and Aaron McDaniel remained a free man. The lack of an arrest and the slow pace of the investigation were a source of profound frustration for Daughtry's grieving family, who feared that justice for Diana would not be served. The final legal outcome of the district attorney's review and whether any charges were ever brought against McDaniel is not publicly documented in available online sources.
