Police arrest suspect in ‘stray bullet’ killing of beloved Charlottean Jimmy Freiberg
Police on Tuesday arrested a 27-year-old suspect in the stray-bullet killing in March of beloved Charlottean Jimmy Freiberg.
“Everyone’s big brother,” friends called the 48-year-old DJ, Realtor, military veteran, family man and avid baseball card collector.
Freiberg was struck and killed around 3 a.m. on March 5 when the bullet entered his Steele Creek apartment, police said at the time.
He died during what Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police described as a “large shootout” in the parking lot of an apartment complex near the 10000 block of Hillgrove Lane, The Charlotte Observer reported at the time.
Police didn’t say Tuesday night what evidence led them to Michael Anthony Cornwell Jr. as a suspect.
Cornwell was charged with first-degree murder after police said they arrested him and took him to police headquarters for an interview. Police also didn’t divulge where they arrested Cornwell.
Freiberg was a Chicago native who lived in Charlotte working as a Realtor for McNulty Realty, the Observer previously reported. He also served as a lance corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps while stationed at the Air Station New River in Jacksonville from 1991 to 1995.
He was in the bedroom of daughter, Charley, when the bullet hit him in the neck about 3 a.m., his wife, Vanessa, previously told the Observer.
She said their dog, Nala, barked and nudged her awake, and she heard the pop-pop-pop of gunfire.
Vanessa shook Charley awake and took her into the bathroom, she said. “‘Don’t come out,’” she said she told their daughter, “‘until I tell you it’s OK.’”
She said she took two steps into the living room and saw her husband burst out of Charley’s bedroom.
“‘Oh my God,’” she remembered him saying. “‘Oh my God.’”
Then he fell as blood poured from his body. A medical assistant, Vanessa Freiberg said she instinctively knew to apply pressure to the wound, but so much blood was around that she couldn’t find the wound.
She said she called 911 and started CPR on her husband, but “every time like I would do a compression, more blood just gushed out.”
By the time paramedics arrived, he had died, she said.
A GoFundMe tribute page to Freiberg has raised $57,933 toward a $70,000 goal.
This story was originally published September 13, 2022 at 7:01 PM.