As Fayetteville road-rage homicide goes to jury, the judge removes two jurors. Here’s why

The jury in the Fayetteville road-rage murder trial will begin deliberating Wednesday whether Roger Dale Nobles Sr. committed a crime when he shot motorcyclist Stephen “Trey” Perry Addison to death on Skibo Road in January 2022.

Addison, 32, was a veteran, a husband and a father. He was unarmed.

Nobles is charged with first-degree murder. The jury could convict him of that, or of second-degree murder, of voluntary manslaughter or of involuntary manslaughter. Or it could find him not guilty.

Deliberations were delayed by about a half day, and Superior Court Judge Gale M. Adams dismissed a juror and an alternate juror on Tuesday afternoon, because a courtroom spectator reported she heard the two jurors talking about the case while eating lunch in the courthouse deli on Monday. The trial continued with the second of the two alternate jurors replacing the juror who was dismissed.

The jurors heard evidence across four days of testimony that concluded on Monday with Nobles taking the stand in his own defense. He denied he intended to shoot Addison when he squeezed the trigger on the gun. Nobles testified he showed the gun to try to get Addison to go away, and that he thought the gun’s safety mechanism would prevent him from pulling the trigger.

The shooting happened during lunchtime traffic at the Skibo and Cliffdale Road intersection in Fayetteville’s main commercial district. It was the climax of a clash that Nobles and his son, Roger Dale Nobles Jr., had with Addison that started because the Nobleses disliked that Addison had lane-split — that he rode his motorcycle between the cars and trucks in the travel lanes when they were stopped for a red light at the Red Tip Road intersection about a block away.

When they reached the Cliffdale Road intersection and stopped at the light there, the younger Nobles, Roger Dale Jr., got out of their pickup truck and confronted Addison, who was sitting on his motorcycle in the right-turn lane.

Addison got off the motorcycle as he and Nobles Jr. argued, and Roger Dale Nobles Sr. fired his pistol from inside the truck. He hit Addison in the chest. Addison fell straight down and died a short time later.

The shooting was recorded on a cellphone video, which was shared widely online, and on a city surveillance camera.

Trial day 1: Did Fayetteville road-rage killer discharge his gun by accident? Cumberland jury to decide

Did two jurors talk about the case outside of court?

The closing arguments to the jury from the prosecutors and defense lawyer were expected to begin Tuesday morning. But then courtroom spectator Rhonda Shirley contacted a bailiff to tell the judge that she overheard two of the jurors in the deli on Monday, and she believed they were talking about the Nobles case.

The jurors were sitting and eating at a table next to her table, she said.

To ensure a fair trial, jurors are not allowed to talk about the case among themselves until jury deliberations begin, and then only if all 12 jurors are present with them in the jury room.

Judge Adams had Shirley take the stand to describe what she saw and heard.

Shirley said she is a volunteer with Fayetteville PACT — the Police Accountability Community Taskforce. She wore a Fayetteville PACT T-shirt on Tuesday.

Fayetteville PACT is a nonprofit organization that advocates for more oversight of police agencies. It organizes protests and other community engagement in instances when it believes the police have unjustly killed or otherwise harmed members of the public.

The president of Fayetteville PACT, Chilleko Hurst, has attended the Nobles trial daily and expressed concern that Nobles will not be punished appropriately for killing Addison, because Nobles is white and Addison was Black.

Trial day 2: Shooter in deadly Fayetteville road-rage incident: ‘I did it’

Shirley said Fayetteville PACT has been supporting Addison’s widow, who also has been attending the trial.

Shirley said she knew the two men she saw eating together were jurors because they had stickers on their shirts that the court uses to identify jurors. Juror labels signal other people in the courthouse who aren’t supposed to interact with jurors — such as witnesses, lawyers, news reporters and other parties — so they can avoid them.

When Shirley concluded that the jurors were talking about a case they were hearing, she said, she used her cellphone to record their conversation. She gave this recording to the court.

According to Shirley, one juror said, “How can we line up this evidence to maintain his innocence?” and the other said he wanted to take another look at the evidence to determine that.

Adams brought in both jurors to ask them if they had discussed the case with anyone and outside of court. Both said they had not.

Shirley played her recording in court. It had much background noise. It could not be understood what was said.

Adams said she listened to it multiple times, and tried to clear up the background noise and slowed it down to try to understand what was said. “And it is so garbled, there’s only a couple of words that you can pick out. And it’s difficult to tell if this case is being discussed or anything else.”

Shirley sent a copy of her recording to The Fayetteville Observer. Two editors and a reporter could not hear the conversation clearly enough to understand what the men were talking about.

Adams also viewed security video from the deli. This video did not have audio.

She said it showed the two jurors and Shirley in the deli on Monday afternoon, plus a third juror who sat with the first two for part of the time. Shirley never mentioned the third juror. It could be that he was away from the table when she observed the first two jurors.

This third juror, under questioning from Adams, said he had not discussed the case with anyone.

Based on Shirley’s testimony, Adams dismissed the first two jurors from the case but kept the third.

Trial day 3: Shooter in Fayetteville road-rage killing says gun fired because Band-Aid snagged trigger

Nobles’ defense lawyer Coy Brewer objected.

He did not think any jurors should be dismissed, but if any were to be dropped, it should have been all three, since all three were at the table where the conversation took place.

If all three had been dismissed, the trial would have been down to 11 jurors, which would have caused a mistrial. The jury must have 12 jurors.

If Nobles is convicted, the lawyers on his appeal might ask the North Carolina Court of Appeals to overturn the conviction based on this juror conversation and the question of whether the third juror took part in it.

Lawyers make their final pitches to the jury

In closing statements, Brewer told the jury it should acquit Nobles, or at most convict him of involuntary manslaughter.

“He didn't intend to fire the gun. He didn’t even believe he could fire the gun,” Brewer said. Nobles’ hands were numb and shaky, Brewer said, and while he was pointing the gun, he wasn’t trying to aim it at Addison.

Prosecutors Rob Thompson and Kayley Taber said the jury shouldn’t believe him.

They pointed out that Nobles first asserted to the police that the gun discharged unintentionally because a bandage on his finger got snagged in the trigger when he was putting it down. Nobles recanted the bandage claim when he testified on Monday.

In the police interview following his arrest, Nobles changed his story from the bandage caught the trigger to say he aimed the gun and shot it, Taber said.

“He told you what he did,” Taber said.

The case resumes at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday in room 3C of Cumberland County Superior Court.

Senior North Carolina reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@fayobserver.com.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Judge removes two jurors from Fayetteville road-rage trial