Herman Charles, a 68-year-old Black man, died in New Orleans on July 31, 2022, in the dim, unsettling hours just before dawn, when the Hollygrove neighborhood was still quiet and most doors were locked against the summer heat. Police said the gunfire happened inside a home on Cherry Street near the Earhart Expressway shortly before 4 a.m., and when the scene settled, Herman was gone.
Investigators described what followed as a family tragedy rather than a street ambush: authorities said Herman was shot by his 30-year-old son, who then turned the gun on himself. Early reports indicated the son was transported to a hospital with a self-inflicted gunshot wound while detectives treated Herman’s death as a homicide investigation. Later memorial reporting for the family stated that Herman’s son, Chad Eugene Charles, also died that same day, leaving no suspect at large for detectives to pursue.
Because the shooting was framed as a father-son incident with the alleged shooter also dead, the case left behind the kind of “answers” that don’t heal: there was no manhunt, no public lineup of suspects, and no courtroom reckoning. The publicly available reports emphasize an investigation into the circumstances rather than arrests or charges, with the son identified in family memorial materials and the incident treated in news coverage as a murder-suicide attempt.
In the stories told afterward, Herman is remembered less for the way his life ended than for how he lived it. Family and community tributes describe him as Herman Wilfred “Magic” Charles—someone who built a reputation first as a professional magician, then as a gospel music radio host and program director on New Orleans-area stations, and later as the founder and host of WHKMRADIO.com. Those same tributes describe a tight family circle—Herman and his wife, Sheila McClue Charles, together for decades, and their only child, Chad, whose own creative pursuits and education were celebrated alongside his father’s legacy—making the violence of that morning feel even more abrupt, like the lights going out mid-song.
