A judge sentenced Ernest Cunningham to 42 years in prison after prosecutors said he went to a southeast Denver apartment to confront a former co-worker and instead fatally shot 23-year-old Kelsey Roberts-Gariety when she answered the door.
The sentence closes the trial phase of a case that drew unusual attention because investigators said the motive came from a workplace dispute, not a domestic conflict or a random attack. A Denver jury convicted Cunningham of second-degree murder on Dec. 22, 2025, and the district attorney’s office announced the sentence on March 3 after the Feb. 27 hearing. For Roberts-Gariety’s family, the ruling brought a clear legal result, but not an end to the grief or to the questions that followed the killing.
Police and prosecutors say the case began with anger that followed Cunningham from work to the couple’s home. On June 29, 2024, officers responded to a report of a shot fired at an apartment building near South Dexter Street and East Kentucky Avenue in southeast Denver. When they arrived, they found Roberts-Gariety dead from a gunshot wound. A resident told investigators they heard a gunshot and the sound of someone running away. Another neighbor recorded a man leaving in a car. Jack Gariety, Roberts-Gariety’s husband, arrived later and told police Cunningham “knew where they lived and had issues with him,” according to court records described in local reporting. Those early witness accounts gave detectives a fast outline of what had happened at the door and pointed them toward a suspect almost as soon as the homicide scene was secured.
Public summaries of the arrest affidavit say the dispute had been building before the shooting. Gariety told police Cunningham had worked with him and had been fired after using drugs on the job. After that, the affidavit said, Cunningham became angry, repeatedly called Gariety to threaten him and had shown up at the apartment before without being invited. Prosecutors later used that sequence to argue that Cunningham did not arrive by mistake and did not fire in confusion after some sudden argument with Roberts-Gariety. They said he came to confront Gariety while armed, but Roberts-Gariety reached the front door first. The public record reviewed this week does not include a detailed statement from Cunningham explaining his thinking. That leaves one question open even after conviction: what he expected to happen once he reached the building. What jurors settled in December was narrower and still decisive. They found the shooting met the standard for second-degree murder, rejecting any suggestion that it was accidental or legally justified.
Roberts-Gariety’s age and the setting of her death kept the case in public view long after the shooting. She was 23, had moved to Denver with her husband and remained closely tied to relatives in Ohio. Her obituary says she was born May 14, 2001, and lived in Denver with Jack Gariety and their pets. Her sister Kayla Ratliff told local television that “anybody who met her loved her.” Another sister, Kylie Al-Nubu’at, remembered the moment the family learned she had been killed and said the news felt impossible to accept. Those details shaped the public understanding of the case because the conflict that brought Cunningham to the apartment did not grow out of Roberts-Gariety’s own relationship with him. Investigators said she was pulled into violence aimed at someone else. That made the crime feel especially abrupt and senseless to relatives and to neighbors in the building, where an ordinary day at home became a homicide investigation in seconds.
The case drew even more scrutiny because Cunningham was on parole when the shooting happened. Local reporting said he had previously served time on a 20-year burglary sentence. Months after the killing, 9NEWS reported that a parole officer had labeled Cunningham low risk about two months before Roberts-Gariety was killed, even though his file showed two failed drug tests and two missed tests in the prior four months. The Colorado Department of Corrections later acknowledged major problems in some parole risk assessments and said it would review more than 1,700 cases. Those reviews were separate from the murder prosecution, and they did not change the evidence presented about what happened at the apartment door. But they widened the public stakes around the case. For Roberts-Gariety’s family, the issue was no longer only what Cunningham did on June 29. It was also how a man later convicted in a deadly shooting had been moving through the parole system without a risk label that matched the danger the case now appears to show.
The court process moved far more slowly than the shooting itself. Cunningham was charged after the June 2024 killing, and the case remained in the criminal system for about 18 months before a Denver jury returned its guilty verdict on Dec. 22, 2025. Sentencing followed on Feb. 27, and the district attorney’s office announced the result publicly on March 3. District Attorney John Walsh said Roberts-Gariety “would be with us today were it not for Ernest Cunningham” and said the sentence made sure he would pay “a heavy price” for what he did. The office said Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt James and Associate Deputy District Attorney Makayla Samour led the prosecution, with Denver Police Detective Gavin Whitman also credited in the case. The 42-year prison term effectively ends the trial phase. As of this week, the public reports reviewed for this story did not describe a new hearing date or a new filing that would quickly return the case to open court.
For Roberts-Gariety’s family, the sentence brought some relief without changing the daily fact of her absence. Al-Nubu’at told 9NEWS she viewed any sentence longer than 20 years as “basically a life sentence” for Cunningham because of his age. Then she turned to what her family still carries, saying, “We’re serving a life sentence of grief, so now I feel like justice has been served.” Ratliff said relatives planned to keep speaking her sister’s name and wanted to honor her love of animals, including through support for rescue work. Those remarks help explain why the case lingered in Denver and in Roberts-Gariety’s Ohio hometown long after the crime scene was cleared. The official record now shows a conviction, a prison term and a completed sentencing hearing. The people closest to Roberts-Gariety still describe something harder to capture in court language: a young woman answering her own door, a gunshot, a rush of footsteps and a family forced to rebuild around a loss the criminal system could punish but never undo.
As of March 7, Cunningham was headed into the Colorado prison system under a 42-year sentence. Unless a post-sentencing motion or appeal surfaces later, no new hearing date had been publicly described, and the case stood at the end of its trial phase.
Author note: Last updated March 7, 2026.