After Raleigh mass shooting, there are echoes of 50-year-old massacre at North Hills mall

On Friday morning, Raleigh residents awoke to the tragic news of a mass shooting in their backyard.

Five people were killed and two others were injured in a shooting near the Neuse River Greenway in northeastern Raleigh Thursday evening. Among the victims were Raleigh Police Officer Gabriel Torres, 29; Nicole Connors, 52; Susan Karnatz, 49; Mary Marshall, 34; and James Thompson, 16.

While the news of Thursday’s shooting has proven shocking and devastating to the community, this isn’t the first time a violent shooting has rocked the Triangle.

Although Raleigh frequently ranks one of the safest cities in the nation, the history of mass shootings in the area stretches back 50 years.

In 1972, seven people were injured and four died in a shooting at the North Hills Shopping Center.

In May, after the a spate of mass shootings around the country, including at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, The News & Observer looked at the history of mass shootings in the Triangle and how similar that incident appears to the mass shootings of today.

This story by Tyler Dukes was originally published on May 31, 2022.

Carol King didn’t recognize the sharp cracks of gunfire. Not at first.

King was 20 years old, walking home for lunch a few blocks away from the North Hills office building where she worked. Her route took her right past the entrance of the mall across the street, where a 22-year-old man had taken up position between a few parked cars.

At about noon on Memorial Day 1972, Harvey McLeod opened fire.

From the sound of it, King reckons she was the third or fourth person shot. But she didn’t put it all together until she felt what seemed to be a hard slap on the shoulder, then water running down her back.

“Having felt what I felt, I said, ‘Boy, someone must be shooting,’” she told The News & Observer in an interview Sunday.

King was one of seven people injured, including two young children, in one of the worst mass shootings in the Triangle’s history. Four others died, shot near the entrance of the North Hills Shopping Center, a structure demolished in 2003 to make way for the massive mixed-use development that stands in its place today.

“Here we are 50 years later and these things are still happening,” King said.

The massacre’s anniversary comes just days after an 18-year-old armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 19 children and two teachers in a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school. And two weeks after a white supremacist gunned down 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Which was followed a day later by a shooting that killed one worshiper and injured five others in a California church, an incident authorities believe was a hate crime targeting the shooter’s fellow Taiwanese Americans.

The 1972 shooting in Raleigh made headlines across the state and country. Reporters first theorized it was an assassination attempt on U.S. Sen. B. Everett Jordan, who was at the mall shaking hands on the campaign trail ahead of the Democratic primary. Two weeks before, Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace had been crippled by an attempt on his life at a Maryland mall.

But that theory didn’t persist for long, said political analyst Gary Pearce, then a 23-year-old cub reporter for The N&O who covered the shooting that day.

“Gentle old B. Everett Jordan — why would anybody try to shoot him?” Pearce said in an interview with the N&O Sunday.

Among those injured in the Raleigh shooting was Jordan’s press secretary, Wes Hayden, who was hit in the chest. The bullet punctured both lungs and his liver, and lodged in his rib cage. In an interview with the Southern Oral History Program in September 1982, Hayden said memory of the event was still painful.

“I looked over toward my right and I saw a lady on the ground hovering over a child — protecting the child with her body. I was puzzled for a moment — transfixed you might say — momentarily stunned,” Hayden said. “I had heard and seen no other indication that anything was wrong, but as I turned to try to find out what had happened there I felt something strike me in the side.”

Three people died at the scene, and another woman shot in the head died later at the hospital. The assault ended when the gunman turned the rifle on himself.

News of the shooting prompted comment from Jordan’s Senate primary opponent, Rep. Nick Galifianakis (uncle of North Carolina native actor-comedian Zach Galifianakis) who said he was “shocked and anguished” by the tragedy, The N&O reported.

‘This has come to Raleigh’

Pearce remembers the day “clear as a bell.” In the decade following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., he said locals were familiar with political violence. But the mall shooting was more reminiscent of the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas, where a gunman fired indiscriminately into the crowd.

“It was more like, ‘Oh my god, this has come to Raleigh,’” Pearce said. “This thing we read about in other places has come home to us.”

N&O editors dispatched reporters to probe McLeod’s background (he was a janitor at Broughton High School with several arrests on his record), investigate the motive (authorities never discovered one), find out where McLeod got the .22-caliber rifle and ammo (he purchased both that morning after cashing out his bank account) and see how victims dealt with the horror of the scene (a mall chaplain comforted those on the scene, then drove to multiple hospitals to be with victims).

It’s the kind of coverage familiar to Americans who in the last 50 years have lived through anywhere from nearly 200 mass shootings to thousands, depending on how you count.

But Pearce said he does see notable differences between recent killings and the one he covered in 1972.

“Two things have changed: The easy availability of even more lethal weapons. And No. 2, this incredible political resistance to doing anything about it,” Pearce said.

Shooting’s effects linger

Experiencing a mass shooting was far from King’s mind when she left on her lunch break on May 29, 1972. After she was shot, she fled inside a pharmacy. Staff there helped treat her and called an ambulance. Even at the hospital, the scene was “chaotic,” she said.

Now she does think about what could happen if someone else starts shooting. At the Walmart, or the grocery store. Anywhere.

“From that day forward you’re always looking over your shoulder,” King said. “Just for me, hearing a car backfire was traumatic enough for a while.”

She wants to see a bigger focus on mental health. And background checks — more red flags that can slow down or stop weapon purchases by people who could be dangerous.

“There needs to be more preliminaries before you just go handing out firearms,” King said. “There are responsible gun owners out there. But bad apples get ahold of them legally or illegally.”

Half a century later, she’s frustrated to see these massacres continue — and that the United States is the only place where they happen with real frequency.

“Evidently, everybody in the world is doing something right, and we’re doing something wrong,” she said. “We need to fix it.”

Colleen Hammond contributed to this report.