A 23-year-old NC State University student was charged with felony assault last Friday after a week-long flurry of rush-hour shootings along I-40 and near I-440. Andrew Graney’s arrest came after Raleigh police scrambled to find the shooter who fired into eight cars and four houses, all in southwest Raleigh along I-40 between last Monday and Thursday. Raleigh Police Chief announced Thursday two “persons of interest” were detained Thursday afternoon. The second person detained was released and not charged.
Police found Graney after surveillance camera captured footage of a gray Hyundai Sonata at the scene of one of the residences hit by gunfire. Search warrants showed police seized a laptop computer, a .45-caliber Llama handgun and case with live ammunition, spent shell casings, and a box of ammunition from Graney’s home and car. Graney faces charges of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury and discharging a weapon into an occupied dwelling or vehicle. He is being held without bond in the Wake County jail.
California teen admits to making hundreds of hoax emergency calls. A California teenager has admitted to making hundreds of hoax emergency calls (also called “swatting”) over a two-year period. Alan Filion was accused of making more than 375 hoax calls from August 2022 to January 2024, some in a “swatting-for-a-fee service” he advertised online using false internet handles. Among the charges, Filion pleaded guilty to making a call in May 2023 to police in Sanford, Florida, targeting a mosque. During the call, he said he planned to conduct a mass shooting in the name of Satan, and had an AR-15 assault-style rifle and pipe bombs. Audio recordings of gunfire played in the background. The DOJ and FBI tracked Filion down, arrested him at his California home earlier this year, and extradited him to Florida.
Filion pleaded guilty to four counts of interstate transmission of threats in a plea deal approved by the U.S District Court in Orlando, Florida. Because each count carries a five-year sentence and a fine of $250,000, he could spend the next 20 years behind bars and faces a $1 million fine. He is scheduled to be sentenced in February.
Woman arrested after her 10-year-old son walks a mile away from home. A Georgia mother was arrested and accused of endangering her son after the unsupervised 10-year-old walked less than a mile away from home. Brittany Patterson had taken another son to a doctor when the local sheriff’s department called to say her 10-year-old boy had wandered from their home and into town.
Deputies drove the boy home. Hours later, the sheriff’s department came back to the family’s home where Patterson was handcuffed, arrested, and booked for suspicion of reckless conduct under a $500 bail. According to this story, authorities have offered to drop the charge if Patterson signs a form that outlines a safety plan guaranteeing that her children would always be under a watchful eye. Patterson refuses to sign the form and plans to contest the charge that carries up a year behind bars.
Governor Cooper grants two pardons and six commutations. US News reports that Governor Roy Cooper has commuted sentences served by six criminal offenders in state prisons and granted pardons to two others. The pardons of innocence issued Wednesday give the persons wrongly imprisoned for erroneous felony convictions the ability to seek monetary compensation from the North Carolina Industrial Commission.
One pardon was issued to Mark Crotts, who was once convicted of murdering an elderly Alamance County couple in 1990. Crotts served two years in prison before his convictions were set aside by a court. He was ultimately acquitted in a retrial. The other pardon went to Darron Carmon, who was convicted in 1994 of robbery with a dangerous weapon at a Pitt County convenience store and served more than seven years in prison. Carmon was exonerated in 2022 after a judge vacated his conviction as new evidence surfaced.
Four of the commutations originated from recommendations by a special board that Cooper created during his second term to review petitions from people sentenced to prison for crimes committed while they were under the age of 18. The governor also granted commutations to two other offenders sentenced in the 1990s to life in prison without parole. During that time a law contained a process by which their sentences can be reviewed after 25 years by a trial judge in the county where the conviction happened and the state parole commission. While that review law has since been repealed, it still applies to such offenders convicted during that era.
Vaccine opponent sentenced to 5 years for encouraging terrorism during pandemic. Across the pond, a man was sentenced on Monday to five years in prison after being convicted of encouraging terrorism. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Patrick Ruane made himself known as an opponent of the vaccine, writing social media posts urging violence against scientists, politicians, and public health officials. One message described “whacking” England’s chief medical officer over the head. In a series of messages in 2021, Ruane posted that he was “all for hunting them down and … executing” those who made and delivered COVID-19 vaccines. He encouraged others to “find where they live, put a kill squad together and shoot” them in their beds.
A prosecutor on the case said the posts reached a “very large audience” through two social media chat groups, one of which had 18,000 users and the other 8,000 users. Ruane was initially arrested in November 2021 and charged almost two years later. He was convicted at London’s Central Criminal Court in September on two counts of encouraging terrorism. During sentencing on Monday, Judge Richard Marks said Ruane’s messages were “extremely dangerous” during a volatile time.
New podcast episode. Phil Dixon has released Episode 14 of his podcast, the North Carolina Criminal Debrief. You can access the episode here or through your favorite podcast app on your phone. This episode covers recent Second Amendment developments from the U.S. Supreme Court and the Fourth Circuit, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court decision on substitute analysts, Smith v. Arizona.