Danielle Nemetz, 19, was shot and killed inside her Lakewood, Washington, apartment on October 16, 2014. Her husband, Army soldier Skylar Nemetz, said it was a gun-cleaning accident. Prosecutors charged him with murder.
Danielle Rippeon met Skylar Nemetz on Facebook during her junior year of high school in McKinleyville, California. He had recently graduated from a neighboring high school and was preparing to leave for the Army.
The two grew close almost immediately. Within a month, Danielle had moved into the home of Skylar’s mother, Danette Heller. Heller later said she felt for Danielle’s difficult upbringing and grew to see her as a daughter, even though her son had known Danielle for only a few weeks.
After three months together, Skylar bought a diamond ring and proposed on top of Kneeland Mountain during a break from his Army training in Georgia. Not long after, he shipped out to finish basic training, leaving Danielle to wait for him back in California.
On March 7, 2013, the same day Skylar graduated from boot camp, the couple traveled to a courthouse and were married. Danielle was 18 years old, and she left high school before the wedding took place.
The two of them settled into off-base housing in Lakewood, Washington, near Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Skylar had been assigned there as an infantry specialist with the Army’s 7th Infantry Division.
Once she was settled in Washington, Danielle enrolled in a local high school to finish her remaining coursework. She also adopted a puppy and took a job with a granite countertop company, where part of her work involved filming videos of finished projects for the business.
People who had known Danielle before the marriage grew concerned once she moved away. James Peltier, a former neighbor who had been close to her growing up, was someone she considered a father figure.
He said he met Skylar only a handful of times, and that Skylar showed little interest in getting to know him or the rest of her circle. Danielle told Peltier that Skylar had once smashed her phone in a fit of anger.
She said he quickly bought her a replacement and insisted she had already forgiven him. Danielle’s best friend since childhood, Michayla Yingling, spoke with her by phone or video call almost every day.
Yingling said Danielle seemed to feel pressure to keep the apartment spotless before Skylar came home from work, including shampooing the carpets so everything looked exactly the way he wanted.
Text messages later shown in court reflected a similarly controlling tone. In one exchange, Skylar criticized an online purchase Danielle had made without asking him first. In another, he called her an idiot.
When Skylar once accused her of spending time with an old friend, Danielle wrote back that he needed to either work on his insecurities or learn to trust her.
Danielle and Skylar shared an interest in firearms and often went to shooting ranges together during their marriage. For her 19th birthday, Skylar built her a custom rifle, an AR-15 finished in blue, her favorite color.
In late September 2014, Skylar left for a 19-day Army training mission in Eastern Washington, living out of a military vehicle with three other soldiers for much of that stretch.
Before leaving, he took the AR-15 out of the household gun safe and left it unloaded in the bedroom closet in case Danielle needed it for protection while he was away. The couple’s other firearms, roughly a dozen of them, stayed locked inside the safe, a rule that had long been part of Skylar’s family.
While he was gone, Skylar asked an Army friend, Anthony Faas, to buy him two bottles of alcohol, Sailor Jerry’s rum and Fireball whiskey, since he was under the legal drinking age of 21.
Faas never followed through, so Danielle, wanting the bottles ready for Skylar’s return, turned to two other men, including her old friend Jeremy Henry, to buy them instead.
Skylar came home from the training mission that afternoon. Danielle drove to the base to pick him up, and the couple stopped to order a pizza before returning to their apartment.
They spent the afternoon relaxing together, and at one point Danielle showed Skylar some of the project videos she had been editing for work. That evening, Danielle video-chatted briefly with Yingling for the second time that day.
Yingling later said Danielle seemed happy during the call and that Skylar, who came into view at one point, appeared to be in a good mood as well.
Sometime before the call, Danielle had carried the rifle from the bedroom closet into the small second bedroom where her computer sat, and she asked Skylar to put it back in the safe. He stayed on the couch instead, watching television.
Investigators later concluded that Skylar had learned from Faas that Jeremy Henry, not Faas, had bought the alcohol. They believed this discovery angered him, although no one who saw the couple that day reported hearing them argue.
About 30 minutes after Danielle’s request, and roughly 12 minutes after she said goodbye to Yingling and ended the call, Skylar walked into the spare bedroom to put the rifle away.
He told police he believed the chamber was empty and that he was simply checking it before returning it to the safe. The rifle fired once. The bullet struck the back of Danielle’s head as she sat facing her computer screen, passing through and striking the monitor. She died instantly.
Skylar did not call 911. Two neighbors, who heard the gunshot along with Skylar’s shouting afterward, placed the call themselves. Recordings of those calls show the neighbors sounding confused.
They told dispatchers only that they had heard a loud bang, that Skylar had described it as an accident, and that he did not want anyone else coming inside the apartment to see Danielle.
Before officers arrived, Skylar hid the rifle’s magazine, moved the gun back into the closet, and emptied the two bottles of alcohol before throwing the empty bottles off the apartment balcony.
When police arrived, they found no trace of Danielle’s blood on his hands or clothing, a detail investigators later said showed he had made no attempt to comfort or aid her.
He was placed in handcuffs and taken into custody, then questioned for roughly seven and a half hours by Lakewood police detectives Richard Barnard and Todd Jordan.
During questioning, Skylar’s account of the shooting shifted several times. He first told detectives he had been holding the rifle near his thigh when it fired, then changed his story to say it had been up near his shoulder. He also went back and forth on whether he had pulled the trigger.
At one point he said the weapon simply discharged. At another, he admitted the trigger had to have been pulled for that to happen. Skylar was charged with first-degree murder and held in jail on $1 million bail.
A judge later reduced that amount by 65 percent, to roughly $350,000, after receiving dozens of letters of support from Skylar’s family and friends. He posted bail and was released to await trial wearing an ankle monitor.
His mother sold most of her belongings and left his teenage brother with friends in Utah. She moved to Tacoma to help pay for his defense and eventually hired attorney Michael Stewart to represent him.
Pierce County prosecutors Greg Greer and Jared Ausserer built their case on the theory that Skylar shot Danielle in a jealous rage after learning she had turned to Jeremy Henry for the alcohol.
At the time Skylar was first charged, Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist told FOX 13 Seattle that the killing was “an unfortunate example of why we need to keep working to end domestic violence.”
Forensic testimony presented at trial showed that the rifle could not have fired without the trigger being pulled, contradicting any claim that it discharged on its own.
Investigators also testified that blood found along the path Skylar took through the apartment afterward was his own, from a cut on his finger, rather than Danielle’s. Prosecutors argued this showed he never went to her side after the shot was fired.
The trial opened in January 2016 in Pierce County Superior Court before Judge Jack Nevin and lasted about a month. The defense, led by attorney Michael Stewart, argued that the shooting was a tragic and reckless accident rather than an intentional killing.
Stewart got one of the state’s own gun experts to acknowledge on the stand that a person could mistakenly believe an AR-15 was unloaded if the weapon was not cleared using the correct procedure.
A defense forensic expert, Kay Sweeney, testified that the bullet’s height when it struck Danielle was roughly 46 and a half inches off the floor, close to chest level rather than the shoulder height detectives had once suggested.
Skylar testified in his own defense over two days, crying repeatedly as he described picking up the rifle and insisting he never meant to hurt his wife. Under cross-examination from Greer, his demeanor shifted.
He repeatedly said he could not recall key details, including a conversation with Faas about the alcohol that Faas insisted had taken place. In an unusual move for a defense attorney, Stewart told jurors in closing arguments that they should not acquit Skylar entirely but should instead convict him of the lesser charge of first-degree manslaughter.
After deliberating for seven days, the jury rejected the first-degree murder charge. Jurors found Skylar guilty of first-degree manslaughter, and separately agreed unanimously that he had been armed with a firearm when he committed the crime.
Jury foreman Ralph Flick and several other jurors said afterward that, aside from Faas’s account, they could find no evidence that Skylar had been angry with Danielle that day. Jurors also conducted their own reenactment using a similar rifle.
They concluded it was possible for someone to believe a loaded chamber was empty after failing to clear the weapon correctly, which left them unable to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the shooting had been intentional.
At his sentencing hearing three weeks later, Skylar addressed the court, apologized to Danielle’s family and friends, and said he took full responsibility for his actions.
Citing Skylar’s extensive firearms training both in and out of the Army, Judge Nevin said in the sentencing record that he “can’t think of anything that can extenuate or can mitigate the level of recklessness” involved.
Nevin then imposed the maximum sentence within the standard range, 13 and a half years in prison, a term that included a five-year enhancement for using a firearm in the crime.
Skylar challenged his sentence twice in the years that followed, without success. In 2018, the Washington State Court of Appeals rejected his argument that the evidence was insufficient to support the firearm enhancement added to his sentence.
In 2020, the same court denied a separate petition. It argued that the trial judge had failed to properly weigh his youth — he was 20 years old at the time of the shooting — as grounds for a shorter prison term.
The court noted that his extensive training made his conduct especially reckless regardless of his age. According to CBS News, Skylar’s earliest possible release date is in 2028, when he will be 34 years old.
Danielle was born Tarrah Danielle Rippeon on January 11, 1995, seven weeks premature, an early arrival her family’s obituary called “nothing short of a miracle.” She was two years old when her mother, Elizabeth Rippeon, died of cancer.
She was raised afterward first by her grandmother and later by her stepfather, Michael Boulton, growing up alongside a brother, Derek, and two sisters, Ashley and Mikala, in and around McKinleyville, California.
Those who knew her described a girl defined by warmth and energy. Her high school cheerleading coach, Erin Mikolai, remembered her as a natural flyer, tossed into the air during routines because of her small, athletic frame.
Mikolai also recalled that Danielle grew close with the families of the boys she dated as a teenager, saying that “every boyfriend was the one she was gonna marry.” People close to Danielle believed this reflected how much she longed for a stable family of her own after losing her mother so young.
One friend, writing in her online guestbook after her death, remembered her as “a little stick of dynamite with an infectious smile.” Beyond cheerleading, Danielle enjoyed makeup and, according to a Mad River Union tribute, hoped to one day open her own nail salon.
Danielle’s family remembered her warmly in the days after her death, describing a smile that friends and relatives said they would never forget. Days later, friends and classmates gathered for a candlelight vigil on the football field of her former high school to honor her memory.
