Katryn Shepherd has described the shooting that killed her boyfriend Matthew Wilson as “an absolute freak”.
The single bullet traveled 200 meters from a tree-lined park to her apartment in Brookhaven, Georgia, through a 10-centimeter gap in the stair railing, piercing the bedroom wall and headboard before hitting Wilson in the head as he lay in bed next to her.
“Crazy, right?” she said The Independent in an interview from her home in Athens, Georgia. “I’ll never be able to figure out the likelihood of that happening.”
Wilson, a talented astrophysicist who grew up in England, arrived in the US on January 14 last year to visit his longtime girlfriend of three years.
At 2 a.m. on Jan. 16, the couple was lying in bed at their home in the Clairmont Apartment Park on Buford Highway in northeast Atlanta when they heard gunshots.
When the shooting became more intense, she called the police.
“I’m sure they’re just messing around,” Wilson told her as she reached for her phone, which would turn out to be his last words.
Moments after calling 911, she heard an explosion next to her bed and noticed a piece of wall hit her leg. She turned on the light and saw Wilson slumped on the bed, bleeding from the head.
Mrs Shepherd tried to staunch the flow of blood from his head as she waited for the ambulance to arrive, urging him to “stay with me” as he struggled for air.
He clung to life long enough for his sister Kate Easingfield to fly to the US from her home in Sweden and have his heart, liver and kidneys transplanted to desperate patients on the local donor waiting list.
Matthew Wilson, right, with his parents Pauline Wilson and Robert Isingwood and sister Kate Isingwood
“Do they even know?”
Sixteen months after Wilson’s senseless death, police have yet to identify any suspects or locate the weapon used.
Mrs Easingfield said The Independent in an interview from Sweden that she still doesn’t even know if his killers know about his death and the grief they caused.
“We obviously want the person responsible to be held accountable for what they did, but also to know what they did,” Ms Easingfield said.
“That’s the question that hangs over us, do they even know they took someone’s life that night?”
Wilson’s family this week contributed $10,000 (£8,000) for information leading to his killers, on top of the $15,000 (£12,000) offered by Atlanta Crime Stoppers last year.
She hopes the increased reward and knowledge of her brother’s selflessness in life and death may prompt someone to come forward with information.
“Four Americans are alive today because of his death,” Mrs. Easingfield.
“Maybe someone knows something, maybe they could come forward to help us get justice for Matt, but maybe it can also benefit them to have a better life.”
Matthew Wilson and his girlfriend Catherine Shepherd on the day he arrived in Georgia in January 2022.
Ms Shepherd met Wilson at Georgia State University in 2018 while they were both studying astrophysics, she a first year and he doing postdoctoral research.
Bonded by a shared love of music and similar views on the world, they quickly became inseparable.
“We joked that it was really scary how much we looked alike. It felt like we were almost the same person, just different genders,” she said The Independent.
The pain of his death has barely subsided in the last 16 months.
“We didn’t break up, I never had that kind of closure and I can’t call him my ex.” I really feel like a part of my heart died with him that night,” she said.
Wilson’s killing also sent shockwaves through the tight-knit world of astronomy, where he had worked to develop computer programs to help scientists remove atmospheric effects that taint their data.
Ms Shepherd, an astronomer, explains that space scientists often try to study distant planets and solar systems “through this giant haze of air and water”.
“And that can be a real problem. This is what he has been working on for some time and has made significant progress.
Wilson was preparing to publish his research on the development of software tools for the European Extremely Large Telescope at the time of his death.
“Pioneer in Young Planet Imaging”
Raised in the historic English market town of Chertsey, Surrey, 18 miles (29 km) southwest of central London, Wilson’s lifelong fascination with the stars began when he was a very young child, Ms Easingfield recalled.
“He was always reading and studying. He wanted to know everything about everything,” she said.
His childhood fascination with the night sky led him to astrophysics, a branch of science that studies the birth, life and death of stars.
Kate Isingwood and her brother Matthew Wilson who were shot by stray bullets in Georgia in January 2022.
According to NASA, the area is looking for an answer three broad questions: how does the universe work, how did we get here, and are we alone?
Wilson’s academic career initially took him just up the road from his family home to Royal Holloway, University of London, where he began his BA in 2008.
There, Wilson helped design and build a 30-centimeter telescope and led students through cold evenings as they searched for celestial discoveries, according to an obituary in Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society.
After graduating with a master’s degree in 2012, he entered the PhD program at the University of Exeter the following year, where he developed specialized equipment to study planets outside the solar system.
He graduated from the university in the summer of 2017 and moved to Atlanta to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State University.
In Georgia, Wilson threw himself back into his studies, becoming an expert in high-resolution imaging from ground-based telescopes.
Matthew Wilson’s girlfriend Catherine Shepard released a photo of the pair taken hours before he was killed by a stray bullet
Family says he made friends wherever he traveled. In Georgia, he plays minor league soccer and hangs out with the official Liverpool FC Supporters Club in Atlanta.
When Wilson moved to Belgium in 2019 to take up a postdoctoral position at the University of Liege, he and Ms Shepherd continued to text each other daily and Skype several times a week.
“If there was ever a day that we didn’t text each other, you know, one of us would send the other a good night or an ‘I love you,'” she said The Independent.
At an academic memorial after his death, each of Wilson’s supervisors read a eulogy for him, paying tribute to his kindness and research acumen.
“He will be remembered as a pioneer and researcher in the field of young planet imaging,” obituary in American Astronomical Society Read it.
Mrs Easingfield said it was only after her brother’s death that she fully understood the respect in which he was held by his peers.
“He was a selfless, wonderful man who had a brilliant career ahead of him that was taken away.”
“It doesn’t seem reasonable by any means”
Mrs Easingfield remembers feeling dread about her brother’s move to the US. She said The Independent she finds gun culture “terrifying” and completely foreign to their idyllic English childhood.
When she traveled to the US after her brother was shot, she said she immediately felt unsafe and had no intention of returning.
“You hear about shootings in the US, you know there’s a gun problem, but you don’t expect what happened to Matt to happen. It takes away your sense of security, and I still haven’t gotten it back.
“Our impression from here is that it’s out of control. When you look at the stats, there’s no other way to describe it.
“The way the US is handling this doesn’t seem reasonable in any way.” Having kids in kindergarten doing drills and teaching them to play dead on the floor is crazy, isn’t it?’
Matthew Wilson, who was shot in Brookhaven, Georgia, in 2022, with his nephew Tico, who was just four months old when he died
In Sweden, 60 deaths from gun violence in 2022 sparked a national reckoning.
In 2021, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S. According to the CDC.
Wilson’s parents Pauline Wilson and Robert Isingwood were unable to travel to the US to see him for the last time as his mother was ill with cancer. She passed away just a few weeks ago at the end of March.
“For the last few weeks she has been in a lot of pain from the cancer, but the absence of her son has been almost more consuming for her than the actual physical pain she was in,” Mrs Easingfield said The Independent.
Ms Easingfield, a PhD student in molecular biology, has been on long-term sick leave following the death of her brother.
She says important moments with her son Tico, who was four months old when Wilson was killed, were difficult to celebrate. She is six months pregnant with her second child, another layer to the sadness surrounding her brother’s absence.
“The feeling gets harder and harder the further you get away from the event, the further you get away from the world in which it existed,” she said.
Ms Shepherd said her views on guns had changed dramatically since Wilson’s death. Her family had always owned them for self-defense, but now she despised them.
“I wish we could somehow get rid of all the guns in this country,” she said.
“I don’t think anything positive is going to happen with gun control in this country until some horrific events convince the majority of the party that basically supports the right to bear arms to act.”
She would like the American public to understand the impact that a single senseless act of violence has had on so many people.
“Whoever did this was so wrapped up in their own world that they completely destroyed this life and affected so many other lives.
“We’re still here and still fighting it, a year and a half later.”
The family of 31-year-old Matthew Wilson has offered $10,000 to increase the reward for information leading to an arrest in his death to $25,000
Sergeant Kessel said The Independent in an interview that their efforts to track down the killers have so far failed to yield concrete leads.
So last year, the department’s Criminal Investigations Division began sending every shell casing recovered from nearby crime scenes to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ National Integrated Ballistic Information Network in hopes it would lead to a breakthrough in the investigation.
There, the samples are compared to the network’s giant database of 5.7 million pieces of ballistic evidence in the hope of finding a match.
Shell casings are analyzed much like fingerprints, he explained.
Sergeant Kessel said The Independent that Brookhaven detectives also routinely press suspects for information about the unsolved case.
“When an arrest is made down that hallway where they have that firearm, or we have reason to use them in an interview, we always ask them if they have any information about the shooting of Dr. Wilson to see if one day we have the right person at the interview location and get the right information,” he said.
He added: “Hopefully the hard work will pay off in the end. We’re in for a long haul.”
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