Chad Copley called 911 to report that there were “a bunch of hoodlums here racing” in front of his Raleigh, North Carolina home. This was around 1am on this past weekend.
“I’m going outside to secure my neighborhood.”
The dispatcher, responding to Copley, asked: “You’re going to do what?”
“I’m going to secure my neighborhood,” Copley said.
He continued: “I’m on neighborhood watch. I am going to have the neighborhood meet these hoodlums out here racing up and down the street. It’s 1 in the morning. There’s some devil in them. They have firearms and we’re going to secure our neighborhood. If I was you, I would send PD out here as quickly as possible.”
A couple of minutes later, 911 is called again. This time, an even more scared, and already trying to create a story, Copley explains to the dispatchers how he may have just shot and killed someone.
“I yelled at them, ‘Please leave the premises,’ ” he said. “They were showing firearms, so I fired a warning shot and uh, we got somebody that got hit. …
“I fired my warning shot like I’m supposed to by law. … They do have firearms, and I’m trying to protect myself and my family.”
The dispatcher pressed for more information: Who’s been shot, how badly are they injured — and where, exactly, is the victim?
“Please just send a car,” Copley responded. “There’s friggin’ black males outside my friggin’ house with firearms. Please, send PD. Thank you.”
Copley had indeed shot someone and he had killed them. 20-year-old Kouren-Rodney Bernard Thomas lay dying in the street, pronounced dead at a local hospital a short while later.
Jalen Lewis, who hosted a party at his home, two doors down from Copley’s, on the night of the shooting, said the victim was one of roughly 50 guests at the party, he told CNN affiliate WTVD.
He didn’t know Thomas personally, he said, and he didn’t see anyone armed or causing problems outside his home that night. Lewis told WTVD he has never interacted with Copley in the seven years he’s lived in the Raleigh neighborhood.
“The man’s body was right in front of the mailbox,” Lewis told the station, pointing to Copley’s mailbox. “I don’t know how (Thomas) was a threat from the garage.”
According to Thomas’s friend, who was with him when he was shot, both he and the deceased young man had begun to run because they thought they saw police and Thomas was carrying marijuana on him. When they stopped running Thomas was shot.
Raleigh police don’t know if Thomas or anyone accompanying him was armed, said spokeswoman Laura Hourigan. Police records show authorities were not called to the block — for the party or otherwise — before the first call in which the man told the dispatcher he was going to “secure the neighborhood.”
As for whether Copley was acting in a neighborhood watch capacity, Hourigan said there were many such groups in the community, but she is “unsure if that one is a registered group or not.”
Copley has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Thomas’s mother says he worked at a waffle house, and had a girlfriend about to begin college.
“This is my baby,” she told the newspaper while sobbing. “He looks just like me.”
You can listen to both 911 calls here.