I was probing around a bit more and I’ve found the obvious problem, and it’s not the transistor. The power connector to tI can envision what happened now: an unregulated supply – works fine for just charging the battery, the current is low and the TPS65250 has a wide input voltage range. But, upon power up current demands go up, voltage drops, and this tiny connector melts because it can’t handle the current. It surprised me this would happen before the input fuse blew – bad design I guess, should have used a connector rated for higher current since the connector is on the supply side of the fuse. It took longer to find since I never suspected this, but, was fairly easy to fix. Next time check the simple things first.