Prosecutors say the shooting was planned; defense lawyers say the evidence shows a child in a volatile home.
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — A Laramie County judge has kept a first-degree murder case against a 14-year-old charged as an adult in the fatal shooting of his mother, sending the prosecution forward after a hearing centered on whether the killing was planned or happened in the heat of an argument.
The immediate significance is legal as much as factual. By binding Havoc Leone over to district court on the top charge, the judge allowed prosecutors to keep arguing that the killing of Theresa McIntosh, 41, involved malice and premeditation. Defense lawyers argued the state’s evidence instead described an emotionally immature child reacting inside a home marked by insults, conflict and instability. That divide is likely to shape every major step that follows.
At the March 18 preliminary hearing, Assistant District Attorney Kelly Strickland used the state’s account to frame the case as deliberate. He pointed to allegations that Leone had stolen his mother’s Taurus 9 mm pistol from her vehicle about a week earlier after an argument over his D in math, hidden it in a boot in his closet and admitted he had thought about killing her even then. Strickland argued that those earlier steps, followed by Leone’s later statement that he fired when his mother leaned forward, showed more than a sudden loss of control. “This is premeditated,” he told the court, according to hearing coverage.
The hearing also gave the defense its clearest public opening. Attorney Jonathan Foreman described Leone as an emotionally vulnerable child who had long been subjected to degrading language by a mentally ill mother. During cross-examination of Detective Miles DePrimo, Foreman pressed on whether a child repeatedly called “retarded” might begin to believe it. He urged the judge to consider second-degree murder instead of first-degree murder and asked for Leone’s $500,000 cash-only bond to be reduced. Judge Sean Chambers denied the bond request and found enough evidence for the higher charge, but the defense argument put abuse claims and the boy’s mental and emotional state squarely into the case.
The underlying facts that brought the parties to court remain grim and specific. Deputies responded at 12:47 p.m. March 7 to the 2300 block of Pine Avenue on a report of a woman shot in the head. McIntosh was found unconscious but still breathing. She was taken first to Cheyenne Regional Medical Center and then flown to a Colorado hospital, where she died the next day. Investigators say Leone first claimed she had killed herself. They later said he told detectives he threw a notebook toward her while she was doing a puzzle on the floor, waited as she bent forward and then shot her once behind the left ear. DePrimo testified that the notebook contained the password for a tablet that had become part of a fresh family dispute that day.
That same argument over the tablet now serves two separate stories in court. Prosecutors say it shows the moment Leone seized after harboring earlier thoughts of killing his mother. The defense sees it as proof that the shooting came at the peak of a chaotic confrontation. Authorities said McIntosh and Leone’s father suspected the teen had taken the tablet from one of McIntosh’s cleaning clients. Investigators said McIntosh called him a thief and demanded access. DePrimo testified that being called “retarded” appeared to be a trigger for Leone. Whether jurors eventually view those statements as motive, provocation or both will matter more than any single dramatic phrase from the hearing.
Outside the legal argument, the case still turns on what happened inside the home moments after the shot. Leone’s father was in the basement playing video games while wearing noise-canceling headphones, investigators said, and heard only a popping sound. When he came upstairs, authorities said, he found McIntosh wounded and Leone near her. He later told investigators he did not want to believe his son had shot her and that it would have been easier to accept a suicide. Those statements became part of the early confusion at the scene and help explain why the investigation moved from a possible self-inflicted shooting to a murder prosecution.
The case now moves to district court for arraignment on a charge that carries a possible life sentence under Wyoming law. What remains unsettled is not the broad outline of the event, but the meaning attached to it: whether a hidden gun, earlier angry thoughts and a carefully timed shot will persuade a jury that the state has proved first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt. That question, more than the shocking facts already made public, is the one now driving the case.
Author note: Last updated April 7, 2026.