A Fulton County grand jury on Nov. 11 indicted Raissa Kengne, a former IT audit manager at BDO USA in Atlanta, in the August shooting deaths of her ex-supervisor at the accounting firm and the property manager of the condominium building where she lived.
Kengne, 34, was charged with two counts of murder, two counts of felony murder, five counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, three counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, one count of attempted burglary, and one count of false imprisonment, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
She is currently being held at the Fulton County Jail.
Kengne is accused of using a handgun to fatally shoot 60-year-old Michael Shinners and wound a second victim, Mike Horne, on Aug. 22 at the first shooting scene—the property management office in the 1280 West condominium building on West Peachtree Street in Atlanta. Both men were employed by Beacon Management Services, the company that manages the condominium building where Kengne resided, and were found by authorities at approximately 1:45 p.m. Shinners was the property manager; Horne, the company’s chief building engineer, was shot in the chest and underwent multiple surgeries before he was discharged from Atlanta Medical Center on Sept. 27.
According to the Fox affiliate in Atlanta, the indictment alleges Kengne also fired shots at Zamir Steed and “unlawfully” detained her, presumably in the management office. Steed was not injured.
About 30 minutes later, Kengne allegedly shot and injured 41-year-old Wesley Freeman at an office tower at 1100 Peachtree St., which is the address for BDO’s office in Atlanta. He was transported to Grady Memorial Hospital where he later died.
According to Kengne’s LinkedIn profile, she had worked for BDO in Atlanta from August 2019 until November 2021 as an IT audit manager. Freeman, who reportedly was her supervisor, was an IS assurance managing director, according to his LinkedIn profile which has been deleted.
According to the AJC, a taxi driver picked up Kengne at the Starling Atlanta Midtown Hotel on 14th Street around 2:20 p.m. before taking her to a home in the Ansley Park neighborhood of Atlanta:
According to the indictment, Kengne walked to the backyard of a home on Robin Hood Lane and approached the rear door with the intent to enter the home.
According to the indictment, Kengne intended to remain inside and “commit the felony crime of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.” The home belongs to a lawyer who represented her for a short period of time last year while evaluating a potential claim.
After no one answered the door, Kengne got back in the cab and told the taxi driver to take her to the airport, claiming she was going to pick up someone. She was arrested at the airport without incident.
Authorities apprehended Kengne at the international terminal of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport around 4 p.m.—before she went through security and entered a restricted area—and recovered the weapon she allegedly used in the triple shooting.
Kengne, who according to her LinkedIn profile was president and CEO of Kengne Corp. at the time of her arrest, published a series of posts a week or so before her alleged shooting rampage lashing out at BDO, Freeman, Beacon Management Services, and the Atlanta Police Department. In one post, she claimed BDO retaliated against her for reporting violations of auditing standards pertaining to IT audit engagements. Kengne wrote that she was “constructively discharged by the firm.”
She also called Freeman “the laziest manager I have had the displeasure of working for” and warned people to stay away from condos managed by Beacon Management Services. She wrote “they are not only incompetent, but criminal as well.”
Kengne filed a nearly 600-page federal whistleblower lawsuit earlier last summer that named several defendants, including Beacon Management Services, Shinners, BDO USA, and Freeman.
The filing says Kengne faced “retaliation, persecution, harassment, intimidation, threats, burglary, computer hacking, phone spoofing, and other attacks” after “reporting to the relevant authorities a violation of the SEC regulations, PCAOB standards, the Antitrust law, and a circumvention of the law prohibiting employers from asking about an applicant’s pay history in the state of Georgia. The unlawful, criminal, immoral, and illegal acts presented in this instrument were perpetrated by the defendants.”
The case was moved to federal court in July, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Judge Catherine Salinas eventually ordered to strike Kengne’s original complaint from the docket, denied her motion to remand her case to state court, and denied her motion for a stay in all motions.
Kengne, who was representing herself, then filed an appeal to Salinas’ order with the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, the newspaper reported, before allegedly murdering Shinners and Freeman.
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