Donte Chisholm, a 37-year-old Black man from Savannah, Georgia, was caught in a burst of gunfire late on the night of November 3, 2018, on the 200 block of West 61st Street, just a short distance from the Coastal Empire Fair. Savannah police said officers were called around 11 p.m. for reports of a shooting and found Chisholm and his wife, Desiree Chisholm, both suffering from gunshot wounds inside a vehicle. They were rushed to the hospital, but Chisholm did not survive. His wife was critically wounded but lived, leaving the case not only as a killing, but as an attack that shattered a couple in the same moment.
For weeks, the case sat under the weight of unanswered questions, until police announced that Victor McMillar, then 26, had been identified as the suspect. Authorities obtained arrest warrants on December 13, 2018, and days later, with help from the Savannah Regional Fugitive Task Force of the U.S. Marshals Service, they tracked him down and arrested him.
He was charged in Chisholm’s killing with murder and aggravated assault, the aggravated assault charge tied to the shooting of Desiree Chisholm. The allegations against him grew even more serious the following year, when he was indicted not only in Chisholm’s death but also in the killing of another Savannah man, Jamall Johnson, who was shot to death two days later. In the Chisholm case, prosecutors pursued malice murder, felony murder, and aggravated assault counts, painting the shooting as part of a much broader and more violent chain of events.
The courtroom path that followed was long and tangled. McMillar’s state murder case was delayed as defense lawyers challenged the integrity of the investigation, especially after public controversy surrounding the lead Savannah police detective in another homicide matter. In October 2023, McMillar was acquitted in Chatham County Superior Court. But the story did not end there. Federal prosecutors later brought a separate case accusing him, as a convicted felon, of possessing the firearm and ammunition tied to the shootings. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, federal evidence and trial testimony alleged that on November 3, 2018, McMillar fired eleven. 40 caliber rounds into the vehicle carrying Donte and Desiree Chisholm, killing Donte and permanently injuring Desiree, and that he later killed a witness to that first murder two days afterward. A federal jury found him guilty in October 2024 on the firearms charges, and in March 2025 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. So while the state murder prosecution ended in an acquittal, the public record shows that the man first arrested in Chisholm’s case was later convicted in federal court for illegally possessing the gun and ammunition that prosecutors said were used in the killings.
