Monte Gakin

Monte Elias Gakin was a 29 year old Rapid City, South Dakota man who was shot and killed in his apartment on August 27, 2025. He was not a public figure before his death; he became known locally, and then nationally through wire pickups of South Dakota news coverage, because of the criminal case that followed, a case that reached a major turning point on October 25, 2026, when the man accused of killing him pleaded guilty.

Gakin was born on June 22, 1996, to his mother, Maria Gakin, and his late father, Ralph Jackson, according to his funeral home obituary. He lived in Rapid City at the time of his death. Public reporting has not described his occupation, education, or whether he was married or had children, and this page will be updated if reliable sources confirm those details.

On the evening of August 27, 2025, Rapid City police were dispatched to an apartment complex on East Watertown Street after reports of gunfire. Officers found Gakin inside one of the units with gunshot wounds and began emergency first aid, but he was declared dead at the scene. Police publicly identified him the following day. Investigators later said the shooting did not appear to be a random act.

The case against the man accused of killing him, Kane Youngman, moved slowly through the courts. Youngman was arrested and charged with first degree and second degree murder, pleaded not guilty to both counts in April 2026, and a judge at one point ordered a pause on DNA testing connected to the case. Two other Rapid City residents were drawn into the investigation: police sought a man and a woman for questioning in September 2025, and in May 2026 a woman was arrested on a warrant charging her with accessory to first degree murder tied to the same killing.

The case changed direction on October 25, 2026, when Youngman pleaded guilty in South Dakota's Seventh Circuit Court, not to murder but to first degree manslaughter. He faces up to life in prison; a sentencing date had not been publicly announced as of this writing. For Gakin's family, who had waited more than a year for the case to be resolved, the plea closed one chapter of a painful process, though it came through a lesser charge than the one originally filed.

Gakin's death, and the long legal process that followed it, drew sustained attention from South Dakota news outlets, which followed every court date in the case. He is remembered by his family, including his mother, Maria Gakin, as a young man whose life was cut short in an act of violence inside his own home.