Greensboro's African American Community Newspaper since 1967
The U.S. Senate campaign for Republican candidate Michael Whatley is being accused of using the crimes of Black convicted inmates to falsely smear his Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, in their race this fall. Cooper is the former N.C. Governor and a former N.C. attorney general with a record of being tough on criminals.
In one of the alleged smear allegations, Cooper is even accused of releasing from a South Carolina prison a South Carolina inmate who reportedly killed a South Carolina woman, a power Cooper as North Carolina governor certainly would not have.
The best-known alleged Whatley smear allegation against Cooper comes in a hard-hitting, 30 second campaign commercial that features Ronald Hayes, a grieving Black father from Charlotte whose 23-year-old son Shemar, a college football player, was murdered in March 2024. In the interest of keeping his son’s name alive, Mr. Hayes reportedly agreed to take part in what he understood was an anti-gun violence campaign, and to speak to the camera as if he were directly addressing then Gov. Cooper, who was still in office.
What Mr. Hayes was apparently unaware of was that the interview was being produced by the Republican Senate Leadership Fund, a super political action committee which turned parts of the interview around into a powerful, but false, Whatley campaign ad smearing Cooper.
The ad states that Hayes’ son was murdered by an inmate who was released by the Cooper Administration in 2021. Except that the convicted murderer of Hayes’ son was never incarcerated prior to the murder of Shemar Hayes in 2024. In fact, published analysis notes, the young man ultimately held responsible was only 14 or 15 years old in 2021.
Furthermore, the limited inmate release in 2021 was part of a court-ordered settlement of a lawsuit that was filed during the COVID pandemic addressing prison overcrowding involving 3,500 nonviolent inmates with medical conditions.
None of those released inmates had anything to do with the Shemar Hayes murder, and in fact, the suspect responsible was finally convicted of the crime in 2025.
The Republican Senate Leadership Fund is not officially part of the Whatley Senate campaign, but it legally is allowed to attack and smear Roy Cooper’s campaign, regardless of the actual facts.
For his part, Ronald Hayes said he was not paid for his interview, nor told what it was actually being used for. He told The News & Record (Greensboro) had he realized how his taped interview was actually going to be used, he never would have participated.
In fact, according to the newspaper, Hayes is a registered Democrat and says he has voted for Roy Cooper in the past and will do so again.
Cooper is also smeared with being “directly” responsible for another crime committed by another Black suspect. In this case, Michael Whatley accused the Democratic former governor of being “directly” responsible for the August 22, 2025 stabbing death of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zautska on the Charlotte transit system by Decarlos Dejuan Brown, Jr.
Again, that court-ordered COVID-19 settlement to release 3,500 nonviolent prisoners by the Cooper Administration is being blamed for putting Brown on the streets to kill. However, several media organizations have fact-checked this allegation and have found no truth in it.
That didn’t stop the Whatley campaign from claiming on primary night last in March, “we don’t know for sure if all the child molesters, rapists, and murderers released by Roy Cooper will be at the Cooper party, but we bet those same child molesters, rapists and murderers are in the Cooper camp.”
A spokesperson for Cooper pushed back on the Whatley campaign’s allegations, especially one that stated that Cooper’s appointed criminal justice reform task force was “directly responsible.” In fact, the Republican-led N.C. General Assembly never implemented any of that task force’s recommendations.
Finally, another Republican Senate Leadership Fund super PAC campaign ad “…features a heart-wrenching testimonial from the father of a woman who was murdered in 2025. The ad falsely implies that the accused murderer was one of the prisoners released during the COVID-19 pandemic when Whatley’s opponent, Roy Cooper, was governor of North Carolina.
The problem: Cooper had nothing to do with the accused murderer’s release. The suspect was released from a prison in South Carolina, not North Carolina,” according to the nonpartisan website FactCheck.org.
