On the morning of April 22, 2016, in a Birmingham, Alabama suburb, 42-year-old Black female Melinda Searight's life was tragically cut short. Her death, which occurred in her own home, sent ripples of shock and grief through her community and family. In the rooms nearby, her three teenage daughters were getting ready for school when the unthinkable happened.
The harrowing events of that morning began to unfold around 6:30 a.m.
when Searight's eldest daughter made a frantic call to her grandmother, Doris Doss, screaming that her mother was bleeding from the head. The girls had witnessed a horrifying assault on their mother by her boyfriend, Anthony Lanier Kelly. After striking Searight in the head, Kelly reportedly told her daughters, "I guess I'm going to spend the rest of my life in jail," before fleeing the home.
When Irondale police responded to the children's 911 call, they found Melinda Searight unresponsive on her bedroom floor. She was pronounced dead at the scene. While initial reports suggested the weapon might have been a martial-arts-like steel ball, it was later determined that Searight had died from a gunshot wound to the head, inflicted with a small handgun.
Later that day, Anthony Lanier Kelly, then 36, turned himself in to law enforcement. He was subsequently charged with the murder of his girlfriend. The couple had a history, having dated in 2010 and only recently rekindling their relationship. According to Searight's mother, the couple had been on a date the night before the incident, but Kelly was not living with her. The violent end to their relationship came as a shock to her mother, who stated she had never known them to have a physical altercation.
