Marjorie Krystal Evans, a 44-year-old White female, was killed on September 13, 2024, in Griffin, Georgia, in a shooting that unfolded just outside the Spalding County Courthouse after what should have been an ordinary day in court. Public reporting and official statements identify her as Krystal Evans, formerly Krystal Mallory, and describe a life that had been caught in a long and painful domestic conflict. She had filed for divorce in late 2022, and court records cited in news coverage show that the divorce was finalized only two days before the shooting, along with a permanent restraining order against her ex-husband.
According to Griffin police and later reporting from Atlanta-area outlets, Evans had been near the courthouse for a hearing on September 13, though police said that particular appearance was unrelated to the divorce itself. Investigators said she was sitting in or getting into her vehicle on 6th Street, across from the courthouse, when she was shot. Officers responding to what first came in as an active-shooter call found two people with gunshot wounds. Evans died from her injuries, and the second person was identified by authorities as her ex-husband, Tom Mallory, who police said shot himself after the attack.
Law enforcement publicly identified Tom Mallory as the suspect almost immediately, and the case was widely reported as a domestic-violence killing carried out in broad daylight at the courthouse steps. In the days after her death, Evans’s daughter spoke publicly about the shock of losing her mother and described the violence as the end of a bitter separation that the family believed had been escalating for a long time. The grief around the case deepened because the suspect did not survive to face a courtroom reckoning: reports said he was taken for medical treatment after the self-inflicted gunshot wound, and an obituary published later in September shows he died on September 28, 2024.
As for arrests and charges, reporting indicates there was no completed murder prosecution and no trial or conviction in Evans’s killing because the only publicly identified suspect was dead soon afterward. However, Sheriff Darrell Dix said after the shooting that Tom Mallory had been arrested once before in connection with earlier domestic violence issues and had posted bond. The sheriff also said that in prior incidents deputies were limited by what they could prove under Georgia law, a point he raised while defending his deputies against criticism that more could have been done before the shooting. So, in the end, the case appears to have centered on one suspect, Tom Mallory, with no additional suspects publicly identified and no later arrest in the homicide itself.
