FirstAlerts
Crime & Courts

Three Charged After Five Guns Recovered in Rochester, Police Say

Rochester police say three men face weapon charges after officers recovered five guns during a Tuesday evening investigation.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 21, 2026, 6:27 p.m. ET
Three men have been after Rochester police recovered five guns during an investigation Tuesday evening, according to WHEC.com. Police say at around 5:15 p.m. Tuesday, officers responded to Joseph Avenue for a ShotSpotter activation. During the investigation, officers say they stepped out with a group of men gathered around a car on Hudson Avenue. While talking to the group, police say the front seat passenger, 19-year-old Antonio O’Neal, had what seemed to be a rifle between his legs. O’Neal and the other people in the car were then detained. According to police, an AR style pistol was recovered from the car. Police say during that, the rear passenger, 19-year-old Jaylen Melton, was found with a loaded handgun and extended magazine in his waistband. Additionally, police say they found a third handgun on the floor of the car. Detectives later responded to the scene and started a search warrant, which included the nearby corner store. Police say a fourth gun was recovered from the car, and a fifth gun was recovered from inside of the store. The defendants are Mekhi Ragland, 20, Jayden Melton, and Antonio O’Neal. They face charges including two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the second and third degrees, two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree, and three counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, as reported by WHEC.com. The charges are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 121 Aug 2026, 22:27current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.