Austin Thompson, the North Carolina teenager who killed his brother and four neighbors in a violent 2022 rampage, will be sentenced at a hearing that began Tuesday.
Thompson, now 18, 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.
A court filing says Thompson 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, then 15, armed himself with a .22-caliber rifle from his Raleigh home and shot his 16-year-old brother in the head, the court filing says. The two were home alone after having returned from school and had been playing video games before the attack on Oct. 13, 2022.
The brother survived the shot but died after Thompson took a knife and stabbed him 57 times, mostly in the neck area. Prosecutors said that for the next 30 minutes, Thompson went around the house collecting additional firearms and “hundreds of rounds of ammunition of various calibers.”
He then changed from his school clothes into “full camouflage gear and packed a large backpack” with water, prepackaged food, $700 in cash, a change of clothes, ammunition, fire starters, knives, fishing hooks, toilet paper, a first aid kit and hunting face paint, according to the filing.
Prosecutors said Thompson armed himself with a shotgun and a handgun and left the home, then encountered victims Nichole Connors and Lynn Gardner, neighbors who were preparing to walk their dogs. The filing says Thompson is seen on video crouching as he approaches the women and opens fire. Connors and her dog were killed.
Gardner survived the attack and was able to describe the shooter as a young man in camouflage. She said that as Thompson stood over her, she cried out and asked why he was doing that to them, the filing says.
Video then captured Thompson approaching a vehicle in a driveway, where he fatally shot Gabriel Torres, a Raleigh police officer who was headed to work.
Jasmin Torres tearfully recounted the day her husband was killed. She told the courtroom that she had left home to pick up their 2-year-old daughter from day care while her husband got ready to work an overnight shift.
On her way back home, she said, she called her husband to see whether he had already left. During the call, she could hear gunshots, Torres said. Her husband told her he was going to check it out and hung up the phone.
Torres said that as she approached her home, she heard more gunshots and saw her husband’s car still parked outside.
“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.”
She told the court that she was at the hospital waiting for an update from doctors when a news alert pinged on her phone saying he had died.
Another victim was a woman named Mary Marshall, who prosecutors said was 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.”
He said he knew his wife was a victim when a detective asked him to describe the clothing she had on.
Thompson fled to some woods area after the killings. Law enforcement tracked him down after he was spotted on a roadway. As officers and police dogs approached, Thompson shot himself in the head but survived.
Authorities said that interviews with his parents and teachers did not reveal a clear motive for the rampage and that a search of his computer and phone showed that he had been looking up mass shootings.
