‘I feel broken.’ Charlotte mother grapples after daughter was shot, killed in her car
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Shooting at homes & cars: A rising hazard in Charlotte
Many were shocked when shots fired at a home killed a sleeping 3-year-old inside. But such assaults are not rare in Charlotte.
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Editor’s note: The Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office dismissed a murder charge against Christopher Chisholm on February 1, 2022.
Brandy Wynn was headed to her job at a Family Dollar store on Wilkinson Boulevard, the same store where her 19-year-old daughter, Brianna Stephenson, worked.
Her phone rang. Atrium Health was on the line. The caller told Wynn that she needed to head to the hospital right away.
Brianna was in intensive care.
Around noon that day, March 8, 2020, Brianna was a passenger in her own Hyundai Sonata as she and her boyfriend, Jaquavious Royster, waited at a traffic light at Freedom Drive and Tuckaseegee Road in west Charlotte.
Another vehicle drove up beside them. Someone in that vehicle suddenly riddled their car with bullets. Several hit Brianna.
“I was praying the whole way,” Wynn said, remembering her drive to the hospital. “I was like, ‘please don’t have shot her in the head, and let her been shot in the stomach or something she can heal from.’”
Brianna was shot once in the arm and twice in the head, Wynn said. She died the next day.
The assault was not a rarity. Since 2017, police have investigated more than 3,200 cases of people firing guns at occupied buildings or vehicles, an Observer analysis of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police data found. On average, that’s nearly two attacks per day.
Christopher Chisholm, 19, was charged with Brianna’s murder in June 2020 and awaits trial at the Mecklenburg County Jail. His criminal record dates to 2018. Ten days after the shooting, he was arrested on unrelated charges that included assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill.
A motive for the shooting remains unknown, CMPD spokesman Thomas Hildebrand told the Observer.
“All these kids out here, they don’t even care,” Wynn said.
In 2019, Stephenson graduated from Harding University High School at Bojangles Coliseum, hoping to become a nurse, her mother said. She worked at a McDonald’s before joining her mom at Family Dollar so she could save up for nursing school.
“She wanted to help people, even as a kid,” Wynn said. “When the younger kids from our family would come visit, she played like she was mom watching them all.”
When Wynn was at work, Brianna cooked dinner for siblings, did their hair before school and cleaned their home.
“It’s almost like she was the second mom in the house,” Wynn said.
Her killing devastated Wynn. She’s been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and severe anxiety. Both disorders in time led to panic attacks, an inability to work and a reluctance to get out of bed every morning. She attends weekly two-hour therapy sessions.
“I feel broken,” said Wynn, 38. “I get up, make my coffee and I stand in the kitchen crying. It could be a smell, seeing something, hearing something, anything and it just triggers so many thoughts like replaying everything through my head. I can really see everything from receiving the phone call to leaving the hospital.”
In addition to grieving, Wynn is afraid Brianna’s six younger siblings are at risk too, she said. On Brianna’s birthday this month her 11-year-old brother ran away from home and was missing overnight, Wynn posted on Facebook.
Some music has become a trigger for Wynn, who said she can’t bear to listen to songs that reference guns or killing without thinking about what happened to her daughter.
“I can’t even hug my kids because you fear that it’s going to be another one,” Wynn said.
Brianna’s death has also left Wynn with “feelings of hatred” toward people who “raise their kids to think that it’s OK to play with guns and be out in the streets.”
If finances weren’t an issue, Wynn said she’d “leave Charlotte in a heartbeat.”
Wynn wanted a new life with her children when they moved from Ohio to southwest Charlotte in 2017. She never expected she’d hear gunshots every night.
Eight months after Brianna was killed, a bullet soared through an upstairs hallway window in her house.
“I had just got home from work and one of my kids was like, ‘Mom, I made you a sandwich,’ and they sat it on the bed. I was leaning against the end of my bed, and we started hearing gunshots and I was like ‘y’all get down!’” Wynn said.
If it weren’t for Brianna’s shooting, Wynn might not have reacted quickly enough to warn her children, she said. Fortunately, a curtain rod stopped the bullet.
“This is not a way to live,” she said.
This story was originally published November 9, 2021 at 6:05 AM.
