An American teen who fatally shot his Canadian best friend in a prank gone horribly wrong has been convicted of reckless homicide.

Nicholas King, 14, died last Oct. 30 when a bullet from an assault rifle ripped through his neck at his best friend’s home in Indianapolis. King’s family moved to the U.S. city from Oshawa, Ont., when Nicholas was 5.

A 15-year-old boy, who cannot be identified because he is a minor, has been sentenced to an “indeterminate wardship” to the Indiana Department of Correction for reckless homicide. He and King had bonded over video games, rap music and oddball humour.

Another friend, Kevin Edwards, 18, was sentenced to four years in prison for dangerous control of a firearm. The Marion County prosecutor’s office dropped a more serious charge of reckless homicide in a plea bargain, spokeswoman Peg McLeish said.

King’s sister Tiffany, a third-year political science student at Indiana University, submitted a victim impact statement at Edwards’s sentencing.

“I honestly want to believe that this is all a mistake, a big misunderstanding . . . But I’m not naïve,” she wrote.

“I was told by your former friends that Nick’s last words were, ‘Why did you shoot me?’ ” she wrote. “He shouldn’t have had to ask that, because you shouldn’t have bought the gun . . . and you shouldn’t have loaded it.”

The night before Halloween, King’s friends invited him over. It was raining when he arrived at their door, around 8 p.m.

“They thought it would be fun to scare him,” Indianapolis police Sgt. Linda Jackson told reporters at the time. “Whey they opened the door, the 15-year-old had the weapon in his hands and pointed it at the victim and pulled the trigger and shot him.”

Edwards told police he purchased the Romarm 7.62mm assault rifle on Craigslist. Both boys claimed they didn’t know the gun was loaded.

“It’s painfully apparent in this case that nobody knew anything about this weapon and how to make it safe,” Jackson said at the time. “And now that we have a dead 14-year-old, a lot of people are going to be filled with regret for the rest of their lives over this, and it all could have been avoided.”

A few months before the shooting, the King family took in Edwards, after Nick’s pleading when his friend was thrown out of his own home.

But when Edwards refused to find work and started “engaging in petty thievery, bringing the stolen items into our house,” as Tiffany explained in her statement to the judge, his invitation was rescinded.

King, who had just started his first year of high school in Franklin, never saw Indianapolis as his permanent home. His father Maxwell was relocated for work.

“In Nick’s eyes, moving to Indiana was just a pit-stop on our way back to Canada,” Tiffany, 20, told the Toronto Star by phone from Indianapolis.

It’s why her family decided to bury him in Oshawa.

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Tiffany and her mother Lori are planning to move back to the city this spring.

“We’re working on getting our lives back to normal,” Tiffany said. “The house we have now, it’s just a normal-sized house but it feels too big, too quiet.”

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