By Sharon Coolidge
The Cincinnati Enquirer

An 18-year-old man who shot and killed his sister was reckless in the way he handled the 12-gauge shotgun he had bought two weeks earlier for protection, a jury determined Thursday.

Jurors convicted Sean Wright of reckless homicide in the Nov. 15 death of his sister, Nicole, 17, at his Northside home.

The jury ignored a more serious charge of murder. They also rejected the idea that his actions were negligent, which would have meant finding him guilty of a misdemeanor charge.

Wright faces one to eight years in prison when he is sentenced June 2. He remains in the Hamilton County jail.

During the four-day trial in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court, nobody denied Wright killed his sister. Prosecutors and Wright's defense attorney, Peter Rosenwald, instead argued about the specific crime they believed he committed when he pulled the trigger of the shotgun.

Prosecutor's wanted the jury to find Wright guilty of murder and reckless homicide, arguing that Wright knew the gun was a deadly weapon and should have handled it much more carefully.

Rosenwald said, at most, Wright should be found guilty of negligent homicide because Wright didn't mean to kill his sister. Wright thought the gun wasn't loaded at the time, Rosenwald said.

Wright shot his sister after she threatened - as she had many times before - to kill herself, prosecutors said. Wright grabbed a shotgun out of his bedroom closet, emptied seven shells from it and tried to hand it to his sister, Rosenwald said.

She said no, prompting Wright to say he would kill her then, prosecutors said.

Then, when Wright tried to hand the gun to her again, it went off, hitting Nicole in her chest. She died a short time later.

Rosenwald said Wright was trying to make a point that his sister really didn't want to commit suicide.

"If you had to find him stupid, done," Rosenwald said during closing arguments. "He's going to have to live with it the rest of his life."

But this was an accident, Rosenwald said.

"The gun went off because he didn't practice gun safety," Rosenwald said.

But prosecutor Jerome Kunkel scoffed at Rosenwald's argument.

"What could be more perverse than taking a gun and holding it within two feet of his baby sister just to scare her?" Kunkel asked.

"If you disregard murder and you disregard reckless homicide, you are cutting him a major break," he told jurors. "He doesn't deserve it."

E-mail scoolidge@enquirer.com