A Wisconsin man apologized in court after being sentenced for a fatal road rage shooting in which prosecutors said he told a passenger, “Watch this,” before firing at another driver.
“I’m sorry to all of you,” Todd Gieck said during his Aug. 12 sentencing hearing in Trempealeau County for the death of Kyle Dahl, according to footage published by WEAU. “I didn’t mean to do that. I got scared.”
Gieck told the courtroom that he “acted rashly” during what he described as an escalating situation. “It was an accident,” he said. “I was fumbling the gun and it went off. That’s true. All that I’ve said on that phone was true. Everything I’ve owned up to is true.”
Court records reviewed by Oxygen show Gieck received a 40-year prison sentence, followed by 20 years of extended supervision. He had pleaded not guilty, and his attorneys did not immediately respond to Oxygen’s request for comment.
Judge Thomas Clark condemned Gieck’s conduct in court, telling him in the footage, “Your actions were reckless to the extreme degree. They took the life of Kyle Dahl and you have to be punished for that.”
Gieck was convicted of first-degree reckless homicide with use of a dangerous weapon, discharging a firearm at a vehicle and possessing a firearm as a convicted felon, according to court records.
Investigators initially treated Dahl’s death as suspicious, but an account from Gieck’s passenger later helped authorities piece together what allegedly happened in May 2024.
The passenger told police, according to a criminal complaint cited by WXOW, that Gieck was “highly amped” and moving at a “fast paced” speed that night. He said Gieck had pulled over to look at an abandoned pontoon boat when a car traveling behind them slowly passed.
The presence of the car “elevated Gieck’s level of agitation,” the passenger said in the complaint, and Todd asked what it was doing.
Todd caught up with the other car, according to the complaint, and the passenger heard the “rack of a gun and Gieck said something like ‘watch this.’”
The passenger said he then heard a gunshot along with the sound of breaking glass and saw the other car “kind of go off the road.”
When he asked Todd if they were going to make sure the other driver was OK, according to the complaint, “Gieck drove his car the other direction.”
Police found Kyle’s car in a ditch, according to a criminal complaint cited by WEAU. He had head trauma and, with an object embedded near his eye. That injury was later determined to be a gunshot wound,
Kyle was flown to a hospital, where he later died.
Todd was arrested in June 2024 for first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree recklessly endangering safety and possession of a firearm by a felon, according to a news release from the Trempealeau County Sheriff’s Office viewed by WEAU.
At sentencing, Kyle’s family spoke about their loss.
“The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was tell our 6-year-old son that his dad wasn’t coming home,” Kyle’s wife Brittany Dahl told the court. “Eventually I had to tell him the truth. How do you explain to a little boy that someone made the choice to shoot his dad while driving? How do you help your child understand that the person he looked up to, the person who made him feel safe, was taken from him in an act of unimaginable violence?”
