Chevaughn Donald Fagan, a 28-year-old Black man from Trenton, had built a life that stretched from his childhood in Clarendon, Jamaica, to the streets and classrooms of Mercer County. As a boy he left Jamaica in 2007 to live with his grandmother in Trenton, where he went through the city's public schools and grew into someone family remembered as gentle, protective, laid back, and quietly charismatic.
In adulthood he answered to “PassRich,” spent his free time making music with close friends, and poured himself into being a devoted father to his daughter Ariane and his son Chozen. While working as an IT specialist, he had also gone back to school, pursuing an associate degree in computer science at Mercer County Community College, determined to create more stability for his family and to turn his technical talents into a long-term career.
On the evening of May 1, 2024, that quiet, determined routine was shattered by the sound of gunfire in Trenton's west side. Around 7:45 p.m., a ShotSpotter system registered multiple rounds in the area of Prospect Street and Pennington Avenue, drawing patrol cars toward a church parking lot at 812 Prospect Street, next to New Life Christian Center. When officers arrived, they followed the scattered shell casings into the side lot and found Chevaughn lying there, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Not far away, in the same parking lot, they discovered a blue Infiniti QX60 that had crashed, its front end crumpled and airbags ballooned, with 43-year-old Hamilton resident Jerome Francis slumped in the driver's seat, shot in the chest. Both men were rushed to Capital Health Regional Medical Center, where doctors could do nothing more than pronounce them dead a short time later.
The parking lot itself told a story that investigators are still trying to decipher. Alongside the wounded men and the wrecked SUV, detectives recovered three handguns, two cell phones, and numerous shell casings scattered across the asphalt, evidence that suggested a burst of close-quarters gunfire rather than a single, distant shot. Neighbors watched as crime-scene tape went up around the church grounds and officers moved carefully under the harsh glare of emergency lights, photographing the damaged Infiniti, mapping the locations of casings, and collecting the weapons for ballistic testing. By late night, the church lot had been transformed from a familiar neighborhood space into the center of a double-homicide investigation, its quiet broken only by the murmur of investigators and the distant sounds of traffic along Prospect Street.
In the days that followed, the focus shifted from the immediate chaos of the scene to the painstaking work of trying to understand who fired the shots and why. The Mercer County Homicide Task Force and the Trenton Police Department took the lead, canvassing the area, reviewing ShotSpotter data, and appealing to the public for information. Prosecutor Angelo Onofri's office released Chevaughn's name and age, confirmed that both he and Jerome had died of their wounds, and reported that no arrests had been made. Subsequent news updates and case summaries repeated the same stark status: investigators were still seeking answers; no suspect or suspects had been publicly identified; and authorities continued to urge witnesses to come forward with even small details that might help explain how an evening in a church parking lot ended with two men dead. Online memorials and case-tracking sites now carry Chevaughn's name and photograph, describing the same young father and aspiring technologist his obituary remembers, while also marking his death as one more unresolved loss in a city struggling with gun violence.
