A year later, Moore County remains in the dark over who took down its power supply

They met on a beach in Italy. She was on vacation from her job reporting for United Press International in Germany. He was home on leave from his job as a maitre d’ on a cruise ship. A lifeguard he knew introduced them.

Within a month, they had moved to Bermuda and married. Four years later, they and their young daughter moved to the United States, settling in the Washington, D.C., area where he worked in restaurant management, before retiring in Pinehurst.

“We loved each other at first sight,” said Bruno Zoanelli.

Their marriage lasted 59 years, until sabotage took the power down in and around their home on a bitter cold night, the first Saturday in December 2022.

Karin Zoanelli, 87, needed an oxygen concentrator at night to support her ailing lungs. That machine needed electricity. Without it, she collapsed and died.

Zoanelli is the one known fatality — an autopsy ruled it a homicide — linked to attacks on two Duke Energy substations in Moore County that left 45,000 customers without power, exposing a major vulnerability in the nation’s power grid.

Nearly a year later, the two main agencies on the case — the FBI and the Moore County Sheriff’s Office — are saying little. Both say they have conducted hundreds of interviews while pursuing leads, but they’ve offered little evidence of progress in cracking the case or bringing any saboteurs to justice. No suspects, motives or strong leads have been made public.

Sheriff Ronnie Fields called the perpetrators “cowards” the day after the attack, but nearly a year later is declining to be interviewed.

“What are we able to say other than we continue to work on this every single day?” Chief Deputy Richard Maness said on his behalf.

The FBI provided little in response to a list of questions it asked The News & Observer to submit in writing. There is this: So far, they have no evidence to connect the Moore County attacks to others that have happened around the nation, said Shelley Lynch, a FBI spokesperson in Charlotte.

For Zoanelli’s husband and some in the community, the lack of information gives them the feeling the case will never be solved.

“It bothers me? Yes,” said Bruno Zoanelli. “But by the same token, what can I do about it? I cannot take a gun and go shoot him, shoot whoever did it. But I hope they catch who did it.”

Not even $100,000 in reward money from the state, Moore County, FBI and Duke Energy has led to an arrest so far.

Waiting on who and why

Substations are essential to power grids. They regulate electric voltage received from power plants, reducing it before it is distributed to homes and businesses.

Moore County’s targeted substations were incapacitated shortly after nightfall on Dec. 3. The substation in Carthage went down at around 7 p.m., followed by the other 10 miles to the southwest in the unincorporated community of West End.

Whoever fired knew exactly what was needed to shut them down, Fields said shortly after the attacks. Both had to fail to cause the widespread power outage that followed.

But beyond that, many questions remain:

• How many people, and rifles, were involved? What specific type of weapons were used?

• Did investigators find fingerprints on shell casings recovered at the scene? Has anyone identified vehicles, tire tracks, footprints or cell phone traffic likely tied to the attacks?

• The FBI canvassed the area for any video recorded at the time of the attacks, Shelley said. But what did it show?

• Was this domestic terrorism or not? And why Moore County, a rural but growing magnet for retirees that’s known for championship golf and horseback riding?

Despite the unanswered questions, there has been change.

And Duke Energy says it’s better prepared now to protect its millions of customers from similar attacks.

A less vulnerable grid?

Duke Energy intends to step up security at the substations as the attacks’ anniversary approaches, said Mark Aysta, managing director of the utility’s Enterprise Protective Services. One thing the utility is on guard for are copycats, he said.

The power company took some heat from Sheriff Fields in March over the several weeks it took to provide a list of people such as disgruntled employees or angry customers who might have been involved in the attacks, The Pilot newspaper of Moore County reported. Company policy requires a court order before it can legally release such information, Aysta said.

The power utility, which has 3,000 substations across six states, with 1,700 of them in the Carolinas, has worked to better protect substations and make itself more flexible since the attacks, he stressed. It’s focused on three areas: hardening substations, increasing system resiliency and upgrading law enforcement training. All told, the company expects to spend $500 million over four years in those areas, Aysta said.

The hardening includes tightening access to substations, more shielding of critical components and adding security cameras. Resiliency includes more capacity to reroute power and having critical parts stockpiled that can be quickly delivered and installed when substations are damaged. Training for law enforcement to spot and report suspicious activity has been expanded to include sessions at police and sheriffs’ conferences.

“We’re always going to be taking these lessons learned and getting better and better, because at the end of the day it’s all about providing reliable energy for customers,” Aysta said.

A changed home for LGBTQ+ residents

One suspected motive last year connected the attacks to a drag show held that same night at the Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines.

The show drew protests and threats in the preceding days, and protesters at the theater on the night of the show. The substation attacks began as the show got underway, and the power went out before it ended.

Fields later told WRAL that members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group with a history of violent behavior, were among the protesters. A month earlier, more than a dozen members showed up to try to disrupt a drag brunch in nearby Sanford.

Lauren Mathers, executive director of Sandhills PRIDE, said she can’t speak to the perpetrators’ motives, but she does think they saw the event as an opportunity to attack.

“I just think the timing, it’s not a coincidence,” she said.

Others in the LGBTQ+ community do suspect the sabotage was an attack directed at them and that it has had a continued impact. Evan Higginbotham, a student at Sandhills Community College, said that makes him and queer friends feel that North Carolina is not a welcoming place.

That message was reinforced five days into Pride Month in June in Moore County when the local community college’s board voted to limit what types of banners could be hung outside along the front of the campus. Banners hung previously to celebrate LBGTQ+, Black, Hispanic or Native American inclusivity are no longer allowed.

“It’s important that everyone has representation, any kind of minority group, so that we can feel seen and we can feel safe and we can grow up not feeling ashamed of who we are,” Higginbotham said.

Sandhills President Sandy Stewart, who took over in August, said no one in the administration, faculty or students sought the change. Board of Trustee minutes record the shift but document no discussion about it. Board Chairman George Little, an insurance broker and longtime Republican fundraiser, said in an interview that he did not remember the reasons for the vote. Timothy Carpenter, the trustee who made the motion for the change, declined to comment. Other trustees The N&O tried to reach did not return phone messages.

Mathers, the Sandhills PRIDE director, said forbidding banners celebrating minority groups did not send a message of support. But that said, others have shown tremendous support for the community, she said.

The Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, for example, partnered with Sandhills PRIDE to hold the county’s first PRIDEfest in June. It drew several sponsors and 30 vendors.

The Sunrise Theater continues to hold events for the LGBTQ+ community, including a film festival, but the attacks put an end to the drag show this year, she said.

“We’re not doing drag in Southern Pines this year because of that fear of igniting the fire, and that’s sad,” she said.

More memory than threat for some

The night of the attacks brought a ghost-town quality to Moore County, with lights out as temperatures plummeted. Vehicles collided with no traffic lights to guide them. Residents and businesses scrambled to save refrigerated food as it took four days to completely restore power.

There were few visible signs of the attacks’ impacts in Moore County during a recent visit there. Structural damage was limited to the substations.

Businesses that faced a heavy hit during the early Christmas season were buoyed by a surge of customers who responded to their plight.

“People still come in here and say, ‘You know, we saw that thing that happened to you and we wanted to come in and support your town,’” said Sundi McLaughlin, the owner of Mockingbird on Broad in Southern Pines. “And so it’s really incredibly moving to know that something that they saw while they were probably doing a couple of other things stayed with them enough to follow through and come to this small town.”

She and other local merchants told a reporter that they still feel that memory jolt when the power goes out temporarily from a storm or severed line, but they don’t fixate on the attacks.

“It’s, like, slightly concerning, but at the same time I have faith in our local law enforcement and in the state to be able to put things together,” said Dylan Potter, a salesman and teacher at Casino Guitars.

Aysta, the Duke Energy official, declined to shed any light on investigations into the substation attacks, referring those questions to law enforcement.

Some attacks on the power grid have gone unsolved, most notably a “military-style raid” that took out 17 transformers at a substation near San Jose, California, a decade ago, The Los Angeles Times reported.

In Moore County, the finger pointing continues.

U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, a Southern Pines Republican who represents the 9th Congressional District, is talking publicly – about how disappointed he is with the FBI’s effort.

“I had a classified briefing from the FBI a few months back and I was very unsatisfied with what I heard from them,” he said in an interview.

But having been an FBI agent for nearly 22 years, Duke Energy’s Aysta said he is convinced the bureau will not mothball the case.

“The FBI doesn’t just forget about cases,” he said. “Just because you are at a year anniversary doesn’t mean they’re going to stop looking at it. The FBI pursues cases for years and years.”

If you have information

Editor’s note: Anyone with information about the substation attacks is asked to call the Moore County Sheriff’s Office tip line at (910) 947-4444 or the FBI at 1-800-CALL FBI. Tips can also be submitted online at tips.fbi.gov.

McClatchy congressional reporter Danielle Battaglia contributed to this report.