A deadly shooting of a North Carolina community college worker is being investigated as a possible hate crime, police said Tuesday, hours after authorities arrested a suspect more than 500 miles away.
Goldsboro police Sgt. Jeremy Sutton refused to say Tuesday what hate crime was being investigated. Brent Hood, who was the supervisor of shooting victim Ron Lane, says his employee was gay.
Police say 20-year-old Kenneth Morgan Stancil III entered a campus print shop where he used to work in a work-study program at Wayne County Community College and fired once with a pistol-grip shotgun, killing his former supervisor Ron Lane and sparking a lockdown on campus and manhunt.
The shooting was Monday morning, just after Lane had arrived to work. Stancil fled and was eventually captured sleeping on a beach in Florida with a knife early Tuesday, police say.
School officials say Stancil had been dismissed from the school's work-study program for too many absences.
At about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, a beach patrol officer in Daytona Beach found Stancil on the beach, a spokeswoman for Volusia County Beach Safety Ocean Rescue said.
"Our officer did a well-being check on the subject and woke him up," spokeswoman Tamra Marris said in an email. "Initially the subject had a knife on him and was ordered to put the knife down. The subject complied with the officer's orders and the subject was apprehended without incident."
U.S. & World
Goldsboro police and the Wayne County district attorney's office will work to have Stancil extradited to North Carolina to face charges, Dean said. It was unclear when he would have a hearing in Florida.
Stancil faces an open count of murder, Wayne County Sheriff Larry Pierce said Monday.
The school was placed on lockdown after the shooting around 8 a.m. Monday.
First-year student Joniece Simmons, 19, said she was sitting on a bench outside the learning center when two officers with rifles and a third with a drawn handgun ran toward the building, shouting for students to take cover. She and others ran inside to the cafeteria and locked the door.
Though they were urged to stay silent, some students still wanted to talk. "I was like, 'Hush, it's serious.' I was crying," Simmons said.
Nearby, the private Wayne County Day School — with about 300 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade — also was on lockdown, said Melissa Watkins, a volunteer parent receptionist at the school.
"We saw 10 to 11 cruisers go by all at once," she said. "We knew something was going on; we just didn't know what or where."
Sheriff's deputies blocked the driveway to the white mobile home listed as the residence Stancil shared with his mother and two younger brothers.
A next-door neighbor on the road lined with brick ranch homes, Barbara Williams, said Stancil's grandparents lived on the other side of the mobile home, where they operated an assisted living home. A sign in the front yard said "Stancil Family Care Home." An elderly man with a cane who came to the front door declined comment to an Associated Press reporter.
Williams said Stancil once helped her late husband when he fell out of his bed.
"He came over here and picked him right up and put him back on the bed," Williams said. "I've never had no problems with those kids. ... It just surprises me."
