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We put a lot of stock in court and law enforcement documents, sometimes more than we put in on-record testimony of people or even first-hand accounts from journalists. There are a lot of reasons for that, some good, some problematic.
One issue is the common practice (some would say malpractice) of directly repeating law enforcement press releases in the news — often simply cutting and pasting them, without doing additional reporting or even adding caveats, such as “police claim,” or “the Sheriff’s Office alleges.”
This is a problem because law enforcement makes mistakes, mostly earnest but sometimes malicious. They have an incredibly difficult job, but sometimes they arrest the wrong person, sometimes the fentanyl is actually baby formula, and sometimes the initial charges paint a vastly incomplete or misleading picture of what happened. Notably, law enforcement agencies are quick to announce a ‘win’ — an arrest, a drug bust, etc. — and loath to admit a ‘loss’ – a dismissed case, a wrongful arrest, etc.
It’s not that the bulletins and releases from law enforcement aren’t newsworthy — they certainly are, the public wants to know what’s going on in their community. But the seamless rebroadcast of law enforcement statements as gospel fact instead of as-of-yet unproven allegations can — and will — come back to bite you in the ass. But the news does it anyway (and I’ve been guilty of this, too, so I include myself in the critique).
Sometimes this happens because media outlets have an endless need for content, and there’s an ever-flowing river of releases about arrests, BOLOs, and missing persons releases from local law enforcement to feed it. Sometimes it happens because media outlets need to maintain relationships with law enforcement — so that, when they’ve built a good rapport with them, they’re more likely to get access and interviews when they need to ask harder questions about unsolved or mishandled cases.
There’s also a certain safety in relying on court documents, as opposed to going out and interviewing witnesses and doing other kinds of crime reporting. That’s not just because the public gives police reports and court documents a fair amount of credence, but in our ever more litigious society, there are actual legal protections — the fair report privilege — for journalists reporting directly from these documents, that shield them from defamation cases.
Again, that’s not to say these documents aren’t useful or newsworthy. They’re an incredibly important part of reporting, far beyond criminal cases. Civil court documents have given reporters unparalleled insight into the operations of major tech companies, the U.S. military, and all kinds of other networks of influence — none of that insignificant, I’d say. As my colleague Rachel Keith and I explored on a recent episode of The Newsroom, lawsuits include sworn testimony under threat of perjury that put powerful people on the record in ways the press cannot always (or even often) compel them to do.
I will say, most reporters lean heavily into attribution when it comes to civil cases, which creates a clunky — but hard to avoid — repetition of the phrases ‘according to,’ ‘the lawsuit claims,’ ‘the complaint alleges.’ But even with the most rigorous caveats, the public reaction is often to take the initial complaint in a civil case — the beginning of a long and complicated process — as the whole story.
Some of that comes from the media’s struggle to follow civil cases, which can take years to fully work their way through the courts. In that time, a local newsroom might see its whole staff of reporters turn over. And, of course, more often than not, the cases settle out of court, shrouding the conclusion in confidentiality — and drowning accountability in plausible deniability. (See also: the child abuse cases against New Hanover County Schools.)
Another issue is a lack of court literacy in the general public. TV and streaming shows about civil cases are hardly much better than those about criminal ones (Boston Legal, I’m looking at you). It’s rare that a show, especially an episodic series, is clear about the real timeframe of these things. The end result is that we hear less often about the conclusion of a case than we do about the initial filing — and so the latter is taken as the definitive news event.
And, lastly, when it comes to a lot of court documents, you’re only getting one side of the story, where in reality there are two, or three, or a dozen. That’s a pretty threadbare map to navigate by, so often you’ll see people insert their own theories and narratives about how the world works to fill in the gaps.
This week, we got not one but three very different examples of how all this plays out.
David Squires vs. Wrightsville Beach
The first, and freshest, example is the civil complaint filed earlier this month against the Town of Wrightsville Beach.
The lawsuit is, at first blush, pretty sensational stuff: former Wrightsville Beach Police Chief David Squires, a veteran officer and by most accounts an upstanding one, alleges that the town’s leadership repeatedly pressured him to break the law on behalf of well-connected and influential residents — and fired him when he wouldn’t do it. (At the time of Squires' abrupt termination, the town declined to make the reasons public.)
Squires’ suit described several incidents where the town’s interim manager and Aldermen leaned on him over concerns from successful developer Brian Eckel and former WB mayor and current vice-chair of The Endowment Bill Blair (who also previously had a business relationship with the town’s parking contractor). Allegedly, Blair didn’t like that Squires was questioning the legality of some of the town’s higher parking fines; Eckel, meanwhile, allegedly objected to being briefly detained and questioned during an incident involving underage drinking on his property (no charges were filed).
Squires’ allegations paint an almost cartoonish picture of local power and privilege. He claims that members of the greater Wilmington-area establishment were flexing — on a police chief, no less — over relatively mundane things. There’s no murder covered up, no heinous crimes against nature; the vibes are more “don’t you know who I am?” and less True Detective.
That said, a career public servant was fired, in a fairly embarrassing fashion, so there’s still plenty at stake.
The town has declined to comment on the case (as is standard practice for local government in cases like these); Blair and Eckel didn’t respond to questions. So right now, all you’ve heard is Squires’ allegations. And for some, that’s enough — the suit confirms a populist critique of the Wilmington area as being essentially ruled by the country-club gentry, making political and real estate deals over drinks at the Cape Fear Club, and picking up the phone to badger their way into preferential treatment when needed.
That’s a compelling theory, and Squires’ allegations fit the narrative, but it’s neither the authenticated truth nor the whole story — not yet. We have a map of the harbor, but the truth is inland, so to speak.
It’s unlikely that Squires would fabricate his story out of whole cloth, twice (he filed a similar suit last year that was dismissed on a technicality). In fact, with a few phone calls, I was able to corroborate several details in the complaint — though far from the whole thing. What the civil case will provide, if it continues without being settled or dismissed, is evidence: sworn testimony, phone logs and emails, body cam footage of one particular incident, and so on.
It’s also possible that Squires has some skeletons in his closet that would make a trial in open court prohibitively unpleasant. And it wouldn’t be surprising that the entire thing, if spilled out into the daylight, would be a confusing hash of conflicting stories. (I sense that the messier it is, the less coverage it’s likely to get — and the more people will remember just the initial complaint, if they remember it much at all in a few years.)
So, if the suit survives the pro forma attempts by the town to dismiss it, I suspect the insurance companies will step in and make Squires an offer. That is, after all, what insurance companies do and why local governments have policies on the books for exactly this kind of thing. Whether Squires takes a payday or carries his allegations through into a courtroom — well, we’ll see.
The Cape Fear Escorts case
The second example is the Cape Fear Escorts case, which was quietly dismissed earlier this week. There was no press conference, media release, or social media post — a stark contrast to the full-throated announcement of six arrests and over 300 charges made three years ago.
According to law enforcement, Cape Fear Escorts, a now-defunct company that provided dancers and escorts, was really a front for human trafficking and prostitution. It’s not entirely clear how the investigation into Cape Fear Escorts began, although officials have said it dates back at least 15 years and involves at least 150 victims. (Note, it’s not quite clear, but it seems the investigation looked back 15 years, but it isn’t necessarily the result of 15 years of active investigation.)
Part of what caught the media’s attention was that the initial arrests included Jesse Bright, an attorney whose interaction with law enforcement went viral in 2017. I covered the story back then: Bright was working his side-hustle as an Uber driver when he was stopped by authorities interested not in him but his fare. Bright was recording the stop on his smartphone, which Wilmington Police Department officer Kenneth Becker claimed was illegal. Becker told Bright to stop recording, or he’d be taken to jail. Becker was either lying or ignorant, and either way, the recording of him threatening to jail an attorney who knew his rights was shared far and wide, embarrassing him and WPD on an international scale.
Six years later, Bright’s notoriety persisted. While he had the fewest charges among the Cape Fear Escorts defendants — four, compared to dozens or hundreds for others — he was referenced in several headlines.
Over the last three years, the putative scope and scale of the case have turned it into something like the Cape Fear’s own Epstein files. Commenters frequently post about ‘releasing the client list’ and name a host of local establishment figures, claiming without evidence that they were somehow involved. But last year, when Christopher Todd Evans, the owner of Cape Fear Escorts and alleged ringleader, took a plea deal in federal court for a 27-year sentence, people understandably felt that the investigation was really onto something.
So, when the case was scrapped due to lack of evidence, you can see why those people would be frustrated — and why they’d speculate on the ‘real reason’ for the dismissals. Again, parallels were drawn to the Epstein case (which, despite significant disclosures, has not led to new criminal charges in the United States). I saw numerous posts suggesting that it was clients, not defendants, who had used their considerable resources to get the case squashed.
I asked District Attorney Jason Smith about this, and he flatly refuted that kind of suggestion.
“We don't take payoffs. I represent this community. I was elected by this community. I do not take payoffs. I don't care who's on the list — if we find somebody has violated the criminal law, we're going, to the best of our ability, develop the evidence and present the case,” he said. “So, that’s laughable and ridiculous.”
Smith said he accepted that people could attack him as an elected official and the face of the office, but noted, “I’ve got two senior prosecutors who looked at this, two female senior prosecutors who don’t take crime lightly.”
So what did happen?
As with any case, the investigation continues after the initial arrest, sometimes right up until the trial. Law enforcement and grand juries only need probable cause to arrest or indict, but prosecutors are looking for ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ I’ve sometimes seen the difference represented mathematically as 51% sure versus 99% sure (although there’s some evidence that not everyone agrees on the latter, including judges).
In my understanding, the initial case was launched by the FBI, focusing on Evans as the owner of Cape Fear Escorts, and then shared with or delegated to local law enforcement. There was apparently a sense that more evidence — both digital records and material witnesses — would emerge. There was also, I have reason to suspect, a hope that defendants would turn on each other, a domino effect of state’s evidence that would help secure additional convictions. Smith agreed there was “reasonable cause for optimism,” as I put it.
As far as I can tell, Evans did not testify against anyone else in the case to reduce his own sentence, essentially taking the federal charges on the chin. (If he did, it clearly was not enough to act on).
Additionally, to some extent, changes at the District Attorney’s office may have changed the outlook on the case. In 2023, Ben David was the district attorney and Connie Jordan was the lead prosecutor on the case. David retired and Jason Smith took over in late 2024. Jordan retired late last year, after a plea deal that consolidated the state charges against Evans and gave him a concurrent sentence (which is to say, it didn’t add any prison time for him). Smith assigned Barrett Temple and Allie Smith to take over and, after getting to know the case, they voiced concerns about taking it to trial.
“It took time for them to get into the cases,” Smith told me. “Then they sat down with the investigative officers, they sat down with each other, they sat down with me. We did a critical case review, and we analyzed what we had, and asked: could we prove our case beyond a reasonable doubt? And there was some concern by my prosecutors that they didn't think that we could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The decision was, obviously, unpopular — not just with the public but apparently the FBI, which felt the evidence from its investigation was substantive, from what I’ve heard from at least three sources familiar with the situation. But the FBI is not on the hook for managing the state case, for putting victims on the stand in a potentially losing trial, or in general, the reputational and liability risk of prosecution.
It was also not, by Smith’s account, an easy or cut-and-dry decision. Nor does he think it exonerates the people charged in the case.
“That doesn't mean that we think, ‘oh, they're innocent.’ We believe that the sufficiency of the evidence was not there in 2026, so that's ultimately what we had to do,” Smith said.
I had to ask Smith, given the emphasis the Sheriff’s Office put on the arrest three years ago, why was the dismissal done without public notice? (Technically, they were public, but you’d have to know to look.)
Admittedly, the DA’s office does not typically comment on arrests (although there are exceptions, including the Tru Colors case, where then-DA Ben David and Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo both joined Sheriff Ed McMahon for the announcement of three arrests). Still, given the interest in the case, I’ve had a lot of people ask me why it was WHQR, not the District Attorney’s office, that made the dismissals more widely known.
“I wasn't the DA when it was charged, I wasn't involved in how loud the announcement was when there were charges,” Smith said, “So, as you notice, we don't typically announce to the world that we're dismissing charges.”
Smith noted that there are roughly 5,000 felonies a year, and far more misdemeanors, and that his office rarely publicly gives updates on them.
“There are some instances where we'll publicly announce things like officer-involved shootings, officer-involved conduct, because we believe they deserve a little bit more transparency,” he said.
In any case, now we know — so where does that leave things?
For the victims, it's tough to know. We don't have much information about them or their experiences. Perhaps some feel like Evans was the primary culprit, while others feel like the case was dropped too soon. Some might be relieved to put this chapter behind them; others might feel robbed of their day in court. If there are, as officials claim, 150 victims, there could be any number of perspectives. I'd love the chance to talk to more of them, and hear their stories, but right now I have little more than a few brief conversations, anecdotes, and speculation.
For the District Attorney’s office, it leaves Smith and his team in the uncomfortable position of having inherited a high-profile case, which attracted a significant amount of media attention, only to be left without enough evidence to take it to trial — and facing the understandable frustration of the public (and accusations, without evidence, of complicity in some kind of elite network of traffickers).
For the defendants, it leaves six people in an uncomfortable limbo, having been publicly accused of felonies — and association with human trafficking, a crime which conjures up horrendous mental images — without the ability to clear their names in court. After all, the DA’s office doesn’t consider the dismissals to be exonerations, and, reading the comments in the news this week, neither do many in the public. There has been, no doubt, considerable reputation damage done by the charges and subsequent media attention.
For one additional defendant, Brandon Hollamon, the situation is difficult in a different way: Hollamon passed away in the hospital in 2024, survived by his parents, siblings, and teenage daughter. Reckoning with the unsettled legacy of their family member cannot be easy.
And for the public?
For people who — again, understandably — felt that Wilmington was home to a long-running human trafficking organization, committing unspecified but likely horrifying crimes, what can you say? There’s an unsettling lack of resolution, an ambivalence. We don’t know exactly what happened; the dismissed cases were for prostitution, notably, not trafficking, but we don't really know what that looked like. Surely, we can’t say that nothing happened.
There are, to be sure, holes in the map. Or, put a different way, several incomplete maps that we can lay on top of each other, a palimpsest of versions. There’s safety in covering that over with one narrative or another, but the reality — the territory — is both more dangerous and less clear.
The Tru Colors case
The last example from this week was what’s become known as the Tru Colors case: a brutal shooting at the home of George Taylor III, the former chief operating officer of TRU Colors Brewery, that took the life of Koredreese Tyson and Bri’Yanna Williams and badly wounded M’Kayla Walker.
I’ve covered this case for a long time, starting with the warm Saturday morning in July 2021, when I drove out to Taylor’s wealthy Middle Sound Loop neighborhood after getting a tip about the shooting. Not long after the murders, three people were arrested, but then the case bogged down for years, defense attorneys came and went, new theories emerged and fizzled, and family members — of both defendants and the deceased and injured — continued to wait.
This Thursday, almost five years after they were arrested, Omonte Bell and Dyrell Green were sentenced to life in prison without parole for the crime. (Last year, the third defendant, Raquel Adams, received a similar sentence.) The state argued that the killings were essentially a gang hit: Tyson was a high-ranking gang leader; the defendants were allegedly members of a rival organization.
After the sentencing, Bell told the families of the victims he was sorry for their loss. Green swore he did not kill Williams and told Tyson’s family he did not know Koredreese and, like Bell, was also sorry for their loss.
All three defendants are appealing, so there’s an asterisk there — but for most people, this is the end of the story. Years from now, if someone recalls the case — ‘oh yeah, I kinda remember the Tru Colors murders’ — they might Google it and get a quick AI synopsis.
Faded, or missing, will be the lingering questions: the grand jury debacle, where inaccurate information was used to secure an indictment, the existence of another potential suspect, and Green’s protestations of innocence. The details of the trial will also likely be forgotten, including the state’s complex web of digital evidence — including cell phone messages and geolocation records — that were necessary in the absence of any physical evidence or direct witnesses.
In the end, the jury was convinced. I watched the eight or nine jurors I could see from my seat in the audience as the verdict was read. Some stared straight ahead, some looked down, some glanced at Bell and Green, who sat at a table across the courtroom. One man kept pushing his splayed fingers together, occasionally pressing them against the bridge of his nose. If I had to describe their collective bearing, I would say, ‘somber.’ They took it seriously, deliberated for two days (compared to an hour or so in the Adams case), and confirmed, one by one, when the jury was polled, that they stood by their verdict.
I’ve seen some commenters note that this was a nearly all-White jury (in fact, it might have been completely White after one juror fell ill and was replaced, but I can’t be sure because I had a partially obstructed view of the jury box). For those rooting for an innocent verdict for Bell and Green — who are both Black — I can see how that might look. A White jury, White prosecutors, and a White judge (hell, all the reporters there for the verdict were White, too).
But, at the same time, throughout the trial I saw Tyson’s family — who are also Black — talking hopefully to lead prosecutor Doug Carriker; I saw their tears after the verdict, some combination of relief and resolution. Racism is alive and well in the criminal justice system, but it's not always the best interpretive key to the story.
Tyson’s mother would later post online that “a verdict closes a court case but it doesn’t close a mother’s grief.” At the same time, she noted that the three life sentences mean more families are hurting, as well.
“What justice can do is hold people accountable,” she wrote. “What it cannot do is undo the tragedy. Justice has been served, but this is not a day of celebration. Nobody wins in a situation like this.”
I’m not disputing the verdict, but I’m also not quite sure it’s the same as the truth — not the whole truth, anyway. I think, at least to some extent, even some prosecutors might agree with that. Not that they presented anything untrue, or misrepresented evidence. But their case was based on circumstantial, not direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence is allowed, and as prosecutors have reminded me over the years, there’s no discrimination against it compared to direct evidence; jurors are allowed to weigh both types of evidence equally. In this case, it convinced jurors that Bell and Green were guilty, leaving no doubts. That’s what I reported; that’s what the court record will show
And yet, it leaves a hole in the middle of the map, somehow.
I’ve seen all kinds of theories about this case. Before he passed, Green’s father told me he suspected gang members from Brunswick County. I’ve heard people suggest Taylor was involved, somehow. Lurid stories of trysts or deals gone wrong. Some seemed plausible, others seemed lifted from B-movie plots. But I think, at root, they all offer one thing: more comfort than questions.
Sometimes, people feel like a bad answer is better than no answer — and that is, I admit, understandable. Relatable, even.
When it comes to the heart of the story, what actually happened and why, we don’t quite know. Take the prosecution's case, which attributed the violence to the “almost sectarian ideologies of gang rivalries,” as Carriker put it at the beginning of the trial. Accepting that at face value, it still feels hollow: a motive without a meaning — gesturing to a much larger problem in our community that I think a lot of people, myself included, are struggling to fully understand.
Prosecutors know this, as journalists do, like everyone does, if they’re honest, at least with themselves. We might never know. That’s sometimes the case when it comes to criminal justice — it’s sometimes the case with any story. We do the best we can, document what we know to the best of our ability, and chart the best course.
But even then, what we have is a map — and the map is not the territory
