Austin Thompson, the North Carolina teenager convicted of killing his brother and four neighbors in a 2022 rampage, was sentenced on Friday to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Thompson pleaded guilty on Jan. 21 to five counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and assault on a law enforcement officer in connection with the Oct. 13, 2022, stabbing and shooting spree.
According to a court filing, Thompson, now 18, chose to plead guilty “to save the community and the victims from as much additional infliction of trauma as possible” and spare them a trial.
Thompson’s parents and family members of the victims addressed the court during the sentencing, often breaking down in tears as they recounted what happened.
“We lost both of our children in one afternoon,” Thompson’s mother, Elise Thompson, said, before reading a letter she wrote.
In the letter, she said she can’t make sense of what happened.
“My heart is shattered. We have nothing left to look forward to,” she said, crying.
Court documents say that Thompson, then 15, armed himself with a .22-caliber rifle from his Raleigh home and shot his 16-year-old brother James Thompson in the head. The pair had returned home from school and had been playing video games.
James survived the shot, but died after Thompson took a knife and stabbed him 57 times. Prosecutors said that Thompson then collected additional firearms and “hundreds of rounds of ammunition of various calibers” from around the home, changed from his school clothes into “full camouflage gear” and packed a large backpack with prepackaged food, water, knives, toilet paper, hunting face paint, clothes, fire starters, fishing hooks, and $700 in cash.
He left the home armed with a shotgun and handgun, prosecutors said. The first victims he countered were Nichole Connors and Lynn Gardner, neighbors who were preparing to walk their dogs. Thompson was seen on video crouching as he approached the women and opened fire, court filings state. Connors and her dog were killed.
Gardner survived the attack and was able to describe the shooter as a young man in camouflage.
Gardner said she and Connors had returned to their homes from an early birthday dinner and decided to take their dogs for a walk. She described hearing a “bang, bang, bang” and hearing Connors ask why they were being shot at.
The next thing Gardner remembers is falling to the ground.
“I look down at my body and saw that I’m lying in a pool of blood. I immediately went to prayer,” she said.
Gardner said she was hospitalized for three months and suffers from severe hearing loss and short-term memory loss from the shooting. A bullet fragment remains near her heart, she said.
Connors’ husband, Tracey Howard, cried when he got on the stand.
“Austin’s actions have broken me. I don’t enjoy the things that I used to do,” he said. “It’s left me emotionally, financially, it’s left me unstable.”
Video then captured Thompson approach a vehicle in a driveway where he fatally shot Gabriel Torres, a Raleigh police officer who was headed to work.
Jasmin Torres, Gabriel’s wife, said she had returned to her Raleigh home after picking up their 2-year-old daughter when she found her husband suffering from a gunshot wound in his car. Gabriel Torres, a Raleigh police officer, was getting ready to head to work, she told the court.
“I get out my car to unbuckle her,” she said, referring to her daughter, who was in a back car seat. “As I’m unbuckling her, I realize that he’s not walking to the car. … I stopped unbuckling her, and I peek to see what’s going on.”
Torres said she saw two bullet holes in the windshield of her husband’s vehicle.
“I run to my husband. … I saw my husband, I saw Gabe, I saw that he was bleeding. I saw that he was in shock. … He was still alive,” she said, crying. “I tried to stop the bleeding. I had my fingers in every wound that I could get to, and I used my other hand to prop up his neck. … I tried to help him so that he could breathe, because his lips were turning blue.”
He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Mary Marshall was killed while trying to grab her dog after it had gotten loose. Not far from where Marshall was killed was the body of Susan Karnatz, who had been out on her daily jog.
Tom Karnatz, Susan’s husband, told the court that he and his wife were supposed to go out to dinner, but that she never returned home from her run. When he checked her location, he saw that she was in the neighborhood where the shooting happened.
“I got in the car. … My thought was I would go close to where the location was and pick her up and bring her home,” he said. “As more time went on … and I learned more information, my thoughts of bringing her home and hope that she would be OK kind of kept sinking.”
Thompson fled into the woods after the killings and was found by law enforcement. As officers closed in, he shot himself in the head but survived.