Jurors heard that Rachel Wooten expressed fear for her life on the same day Michael Webb fatally shot her.

PONTIAC, Mich. — An Oakland County jury has convicted Michael Webb of first-degree murder and a firearm felony in the 2025 killing of his fiancée, Rachel Wooten, rejecting the account Webb initially gave authorities that the shooting happened accidentally while he was cleaning his gun.

The July 16 verdict moved the Highland Township case from a disputed account of a fatal shooting to a murder conviction carrying Michigan’s most severe adult penalty. Prosecutors said Webb shot the 23-year-old mother in the neck at very close range on April 15, 2025, inside the home the couple shared with their infant. The jury also heard evidence that Wooten had texted a family member that day to say she was afraid for her life. Webb, now 23, is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 7 in Oakland County’s Sixth Circuit Court.

The verdict followed a case that began with Webb himself reporting the shooting. Authorities said the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office received a 911 call about a woman who had been shot at a Highland Township residence. Deputies who entered the home found Wooten with a fatal gunshot wound and Webb with a nonfatal wound. Their child, who was 6 months old at the time, was also inside the home and was unharmed. Wooten was pronounced dead at the scene. Webb was taken into custody as investigators began examining whether his explanation matched what they found inside the residence.

Webb told authorities the shooting had been an accident and said he had been cleaning his gun. Investigators concluded that the evidence did not support that account. Authorities also said Webb’s wound apparently came from the same bullet that killed Wooten. Those circumstances became part of a case in which prosecutors ultimately argued that the shooting was not an accidental discharge but a deliberate killing. At trial, the prosecution’s burden was no longer simply to raise doubts about Webb’s explanation. Jurors had to decide whether the evidence proved the charged offenses beyond a reasonable doubt. Their first-degree murder verdict shows they concluded it did.

The case also included evidence about Wooten’s state of mind before the shooting. The Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office said jurors were shown evidence that she had texted a family member on the day she died to say she feared for her life. Officials have not publicly released the full text exchange in the material reviewed for this report, and the prosecutor’s public statement did not identify the family member. Even without those details, the message was significant because it placed Wooten’s fear before the fatal encounter and gave jurors another piece of evidence to consider alongside the physical evidence and Webb’s statements after the shooting.

Three days after Wooten’s death, Webb was arraigned in 52-1 District Court in Novi on first-degree murder and felony-firearm charges. He was initially identified as a 21-year-old Highland Township resident. Prosecutors said Webb and Wooten were in a relationship, lived together and shared the infant who was found inside the home. At that stage, the charges were accusations and Webb was entitled to the presumption of innocence. That legal posture changed with the July 2026 verdict, when jurors returned guilty findings on both counts after hearing the prosecution’s evidence in Circuit Court.

Assistant Prosecuting Attorneys Shellbe Sanborn and Allison Krueger tried the case for Oakland County. After the conviction, Prosecutor Karen D. McDonald sharply rejected the version Webb had given authorities after the shooting, saying he killed Wooten and then lied during the 911 call. McDonald also focused on what the killing meant for Wooten’s child, who survived the shooting but will grow up without her. Her comments framed the verdict not only as an accountability measure against Webb but also as the conclusion of a prosecution that county officials had treated as a domestic violence case from its earliest days.

The first-degree murder conviction has a specific consequence under Michigan law. State law provides that an adult convicted of a willful, deliberate and premeditated first-degree murder is punished by life imprisonment without eligibility for parole. Michigan law separately makes possession of a firearm while committing a felony a crime. For a first felony-firearm conviction, the statute provides for a two-year prison term that is served consecutively and before the sentence for the underlying felony. The public records reviewed for this report identify Webb’s conviction as first-degree murder and felony firearm but do not describe any prior felony-firearm conviction.

That statutory framework leaves little uncertainty about the central consequence Webb faces when he returns to court. Unlike many criminal cases in which a judge chooses from a broad sentencing range, a first-degree murder conviction for an adult carries mandatory life without parole under Michigan law. The scheduled October hearing still matters because the court must formally impose judgment and sentence, address the separate firearm conviction and complete the trial-court phase of the case. The materials reviewed for this report do not identify any post-verdict motions or appellate filings by Webb.

The prosecutor’s office has repeatedly placed Wooten’s killing within the broader problem of intimate partner violence. National data provide context for that characterization without determining what happened in any individual case. In the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Violent Death Reporting System data for 2022, intimate partner violence was identified as a precipitating circumstance in about 41.8% of homicides of females for which circumstances were known. When the victim-suspect relationship was known for female homicide victims, about half of the suspects were current or former intimate partners. Those national figures do not establish facts about Webb’s relationship with Wooten beyond the evidence in his case, but they show why authorities treat fatal violence between partners as a distinct public-safety concern.

County prosecutors raised that concern when Webb was first charged in April 2025 and returned to it after the conviction. At the charging stage, McDonald described Wooten as a 23-year-old mother whose life had been cut short in what then appeared to authorities to be a domestic violence tragedy. More than a year later, after the jury verdict removed the presumption of innocence attached to the criminal charges, the prosecutor said the verdict held Webb accountable but could not restore what Wooten’s family and child had lost. The change in language between those two stages also reflects the legal progression of the case: an accusation investigated and charged in 2025 became a jury determination of guilt in 2026.

Several details remain outside the public record reviewed for this report. Authorities have not disclosed the complete contents of Wooten’s text conversation, and the available public statements do not provide a full transcript of Webb’s 911 call or a detailed reconstruction of the trial testimony. They also do not explain in detail what physical evidence investigators said contradicted the gun-cleaning account. Those limits make it important to distinguish the facts officials have publicly confirmed from conclusions that would require access to the full trial record.

What is established is that Wooten died from a close-range gunshot inside the couple’s home, their infant was found there unharmed, Webb reported the shooting and initially described it as accidental, and investigators rejected that explanation. More than a year later, jurors heard evidence that included Wooten’s message expressing fear for her life and found Webb guilty of first-degree murder and felony firearm. His next confirmed court date is Oct. 7, when the Sixth Circuit Court is scheduled to impose sentence.

Author note: Last updated Aug. 24, 2026.