A 29-year-old Charlotte man already convicted of voluntary manslaughter allegedly killed one person and seriously wounded another barely two hours after walking out of jail on a $10,000 bond, raising sharp questions about why he was free at all.
David Simpson posted bond on a charge of possession of a weapon by a prisoner and left Mecklenburg County Jail at 12:20 a.m. on July 29. By approximately 1:45 a.m. that same morning, police say, he had shot two men at an east Charlotte apartment complex, one fatally. The entire sequence, release to alleged homicide, took roughly 85 minutes.
Simpson now faces charges of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, and possession of a firearm by a felon. A Mecklenburg County judge ordered him held without bond after Simpson initially refused to leave his jail cell for his first court appearance on the morning of July 31, delaying the hearing until that afternoon.
Court documents obtained by WCNC lay out the sequence in detail. Surveillance video from the apartment complex appears to show Simpson standing outside with his girlfriend, Shakema Scott, when the victims' SUV drove past. Simpson then went inside, returned carrying what detectives described as a weighted black bag, and ran toward the victims.
About 10 minutes later, two gunshots can be heard on the video. Roughly 30 seconds after that, Simpson is seen jogging back toward his apartment while handling the bag. He then drove away from the scene.
Officers recovered two spent 7.62-caliber rifle casings at the scene. One victim died there. The second underwent surgery for serious injuries. Charlotte police said the shooting followed a long-running dispute over a parking space outside the complex, a dispute that had already prompted officers to respond to the property twice earlier that same night.
Scott was charged with accessory after the fact.
Simpson's criminal history makes the $10,000 bond that freed him hours before the shooting difficult to explain. In 2013, when he was roughly 16, Simpson was charged with first-degree murder in a separate fatal shooting. He pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in 2015 and served approximately five years in prison before his release on parole in 2020.
Freedom did not slow him down. Fox News reported that Simpson was arrested several more times after his parole, including on multiple charges of possession of a firearm by a felon. At the time of the July 29 shooting, he had pending charges for possession of a firearm by a felon, resisting a public officer, and misdemeanor larceny, all from earlier this year.
Yet someone set a bond low enough for a man with that record to walk out of jail in the middle of the night. The Step 1 material does not identify which judge set the original $10,000 bond or explain the reasoning behind it.
Tim Cannady, a Charlotte defense attorney not involved in the case, reviewed Simpson's history and did not mince words. He told WCNC:
"If you look at his history, it seems like this gentleman has picked up just about every year up to this point some kind of a violent crime."
Cannady followed with the question the case practically demands:
"So you kind of have to ask the question: Why wasn't he already in jail?"
It is a reasonable question. A man convicted of killing someone in 2013, paroled in 2020, arrested repeatedly on felony gun charges, and still cycling through the system fast enough to bond out at midnight and allegedly commit a homicide before sunrise, that is not a gap in the safety net. That is a system choosing not to hold the net up.
Former Charlotte City Council member Tariq Bokhari offered a blunter assessment. Speaking to WBTV, Bokhari pointed to the broader failure of local institutions to keep the most dangerous repeat offenders off the street:
"We know what these top 1% of repeat offenders are going to do, and for some reason, we just don't have the appetite to take action."
Bokhari added that the cycle felt depressingly familiar:
"It feels like 'Groundhog Day,' to be quite honest."
His frustration reflects a pattern visible well beyond Charlotte. Across the country, repeat violent offenders cycle through courts that set bonds low enough to guarantee a quick release, accumulate pending charges that never seem to catch up with them, and eventually do exactly what their records predict. The victims, in this case, two men shot over a parking space, bear the full cost of that institutional passivity.
Simpson's conduct after his arrest underscored his regard for the court system. On the morning of July 31, he refused to leave his jail cell for his first scheduled appearance. The hearing was delayed until a judge ordered him to appear that afternoon, at which point he was ordered held without bond.
His next court date is August 21. The names of the two victims have not been publicly released. The condition of the surviving victim beyond the fact that he underwent surgery remains unclear.
What is clear is the sequence: a man with a killing on his record, multiple felony gun arrests, and active pending charges posted a $10,000 bond on yet another weapons charge, walked out of Mecklenburg County Jail after midnight, and within two hours allegedly used a rifle to end someone's life.
When the system keeps handing second, third, and fourth chances to people who have demonstrated exactly what they will do with them, the people who pay the price are never the judges or the officials. They are the ones who end up on the pavement at 1:45 in the morning.
