A woman has been arrested in connection with the deadly shooting of her boyfriend in southwest Atlanta in February.
Melissa Charlot, 26, faces murder and aggravated assault charges, online jail records show. She is accused of shooting 22-year-old Kevin McAfee on Feb. 1 in a unit at the Adams House apartment complex, located across from the Alfred Tup Holmes Golf Course on Campbellton Road. McAfee was the father of Charlot’s two children.
The day McAfee died, Charlot called Atlanta police to report that he “had a gun on her, and the gun went off,” according to a warrant for her arrest. When officers arrived, they found McAfee with a gunshot wound to the center of his chest. He was rushed to a hospital but did not survive.
Charlot told police they had been arguing and he blocked her when she wanted to leave, the warrant states. The argument turned physical, and at some point McAfee allegedly pulled out a gun. Charlot said he began threatening to take her life or his own.
She told investigators that a struggle over the gun ensued, and it accidentally went off, according to the warrant. McAfee then stumbled backward onto the ground and asked her to call police.
Instead, Charlot allegedly used his phone to contact one of his best friends, investigators noted. Phone and social media records showed that she called the friend around 10:15 a.m., and while he was on his way to the scene, she texted him and asked, “What should I do with the strap (gun)?”
The 911 call was not made until 10:25 a.m., “at least 10 minutes after the incident happened,” police wrote in the warrant.
Investigators did not notice any stippling or soot on the victim’s body, which is common when a gun is fired in the close proximity that Charlot described, according to the warrant. The Fulton County medical examiner later confirmed no gunpowder residue was present and determined that the gun was likely fired from an “indeterminate to distant range,” given the bullet’s placement within the victim’s body.
Charlot was booked into the Fulton jail Wednesday and remains there without bond. It is not clear what happened to the children she shared with McAfee.
McAfee was “a fun-loving kid growing up, and even as an adult, he had a smile that would warm the coldest heart,” his family wrote in his obituary. “He had a love for robotics, music, gardening, and was exceptional in cooking.”
The Adams House where McAfee was killed is among 272 of the metro area’s persistently dangerous complexes, according to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that looked into serious crimes, lax maintenance and other hazards in Atlanta neighborhoods.
Two months before he was killed, in December 2022, two people were wounded in a shooting there, and two months before that, a woman was shot. Between 2017 and 2021, 34 crimes were reported at the location, including eight aggravated assaults and three robberies.
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