Joshua Mack, a 25-year-old Black man, was fatally shot in DeKalb County, Georgia, on January 23, 2025. What emerges from the public record is a sudden, intimate kind of violence, the kind that explodes inside a home and leaves a family trying to understand how an argument turned into a death. Police said officers were called to a residence that night after reports of gunfire. When they arrived, they encountered 39-year-old Altonette Collier at the front door, and after detaining her, investigators said she admitted that she had shot Mack during an argument. Public reporting identified Mack as the man who was shot, and memorial pages created after the shooting place his death in DeKalb County on that same date.
For Mack’s loved ones, the loss did not appear to be instantaneous. A fundraiser organized by a relative said he was pronounced brain dead on a Wednesday and later died after being kept on life support, a detail that gives the case an especially painful shape: those around him were not only forced to absorb the shock of the shooting, but also to endure the awful stretch of waiting that sometimes follows catastrophic gun violence. The same fundraiser described a family caught off guard by grief and the financial weight that followed, portraying Mack as a genuine and deeply loved young man whose death shattered the people closest to him.
As for suspects and arrests, the public reporting located online points to one named suspect: Altonette Joyce Collier. Records indexed online show she was arrested on January 23, 2025, by the DeKalb County Police Department and booked on a malice murder charge. The available web reporting tied her directly to Mack’s killing and did not indicate any additional suspects. In the online sources reviewed, there were no clearly reported later developments such as an indictment, trial, plea, or conviction, so the publicly visible trail appears to stop at the initial arrest and charge.
