Angela Cohan James was a 53-year-old woman from Oxford, Mississippi, known to family and friends also as Angela “Angie” Regina Cohran or Angela Cohran James. She grew up in Oxford, went through the city’s schools, and followed a path into helping professions, studying social work at Northwest Mississippi Community College and earning an associate’s degree.
Her obituary describes a life rooted in church, music, and community, singing in a gospel group and serving in her congregation, the kind of person who, in the words of those who knew her, did not meet a stranger and made connections easily wherever she went. In later years she worked as a caretaker, a role that brought her into the home of an elderly Oxford man named Herman Slack.
The morning of November 12, 2024 began before sunrise on Herman Drive, a quiet residential street on the east side of Oxford. Around 6:30 to 6:48 a.m., Oxford police were dispatched to the 200 block of Herman Drive after a call about a possible shooting. Officers and emergency medical personnel arrived to find Angela inside Slack’s residence at 209 Herman Drive suffering from a gunshot wound. Despite attempts at life-saving measures by police, fire, and EMS, she was pronounced dead at the scene, and the Lafayette County coroner would later rule her death a homicide by gunfire.
In the hours after the shooting, attention turned quickly to the man Angela had been hired to care for. Herman Slack, an 89-year-old Oxford resident, lived at the Herman Drive address where the shooting occurred and was known locally as an apartment manager in the area. Multiple news outlets reported that he was taken into custody that same morning; by later that day or the next, police publicly announced that Slack had been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in connection with Angela’s death. Booking records from Lafayette County show him jailed on a murder charge on November 12, 2024. The Oxford Eagle’s updated coverage, citing local authorities, identified the victim by name as Angela Cohan James and confirmed that she was working as Slack’s caretaker at the time of the shooting; the same report noted that Slack was reported to have dementia, a detail that would shadow later discussions of the case.
As days passed and the shock settled over Oxford, Angela’s family prepared her funeral, celebrated at a local church and funeral home that highlighted her faith, her education, and the relationships she had built over five decades in the community. Meanwhile, the criminal case against Slack moved into the courts. Early reports from regional media and police press releases stressed that the investigation was ongoing and that authorities had not yet publicly discussed a motive for the shooting. Neighbors quoted in local reporting described a quiet neighborhood jolted by the sight of police cars and crime scene tape, and community-focused outlets wrote about residents struggling to reconcile the image of an elderly man with the severity of the charge against him.
By early 2025, the case had advanced to a grand jury. In February, a Lafayette County grand jury handed down an indictment formally charging Herman Slack with first-degree murder for allegedly shooting Angela at about 6:30 a.m. on November 12, 2024, at his home on Herman Drive. Coverage of the indictment noted that Slack, still described as 89 years old, entered a plea of not guilty and waived a formal arraignment hearing on February 21. The same reporting stated that he had been released on bond while awaiting trial and that no trial date had yet been set as of late March 2025. In the civil courts, Angela’s daughter, identified in news coverage as Lydia Holland, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Slack in Lafayette County Circuit Court in January, a parallel action seeking accountability for the killing through damages and judicial findings separate from the criminal proceedings.
Publicly available records and reporting up through 2025 do not show a completed criminal trial or a conviction in the case, leaving the legal outcome unresolved in the public eye. What they do make clear is the arc of one November morning in Oxford: a caretaker arriving to tend to an aging client; a gunshot that shattered a household and a neighborhood; an elderly suspect led away in handcuffs on a first-degree murder charge; and a family left to mourn a woman remembered as faithful, sociable, and devoted to caring for others, even as they pursue answers and justice in court.
