Investigators believe that 25-year-old Lafferty shot Campbell before turning the gun on himself in an alleged murder-suicide, PEOPLE reports.
A neighbor and friend of Campbell called police at 2.30am on Sunday morning after she had gone to check on the young woman.
“I just walked into my best friend’s apartment and her and her boyfriend are laying on the kitchen floor dead and bleeding,” she says in her call to police, as obtained by local media outlet The Lantern.
“I refuse to go back in there.”
The friend explained in the call: “I literally walked in their front door and they’re right there. Because she lives in my apartment building and she hasn’t answered my phone calls since yesterday. So I went in there and the door was unlocked and they were right there on the floor.”
Columbus police Sgt. Dave Sicilian told NBC4 the deaths were an apparent murder-suicide.
“It appears that the male murdered the female and then turned a firearm on himself,” he said.
“[This was] a domestic related situation that resulted in these deaths.”
Lafferty—who was a recent graduate of U.S. Merchant Marine Academy—had reportedly been dating Campbell for eight months.
This article originally appeared on marie claire.
