NAACP asks for special prosecutor in Caswell County case

YANCEYVILLE, N.C. — The NAACP has requested that a special prosecutor be assigned to a Caswell County, N.C., shooting that injured two children, according to an open letter from the North Carolina State Conference of NAACP branches.

John Clyde Fuqua, of Leasburg, N.C., faces two counts of assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon in a Sept. 5 shooting in that injured a 7- and 10-year-old.

Caswell County District Attorney Joel Brewer said in September that he was seeking ethnic intimidation charges in the shooting. Fuqua is white, and the children are black.

The day of the shooting, Fuqua used racial slurs during an argument with a black man, according to court records. The argument was about the man turning his dump truck around in Fuqua’s driveway. Fuqua grabbed a shotgun from his house and fired it at the black man, according to court documents. But he missed and hit the two children, who were walking on a nearby road.

In the open letter, the North Carolina National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ex-pressed concern that Fuqua had not been charged with intent to kill.

A grand jury rejected the intent to kill indictments after Brewer presented them on Oct. 13.

The letter also cited the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation’s look at Brewer as a distraction from the Fuqua case. Noelle Talley, a spokeswoman for the SBI, said Nov. 12 that her office has begun an investigation into Brewer. She couldn’t comment on the specifics of that investigation.

“Based on the new fact that you are under investigation by the SBI in another matter, and our conclusion that you were unable to give this case the type of attention it deserved before this investigation was an-nounced, we renew our request (that) you exercise your statutory right to request the Attorney General to assign a special prosecutor to the Fuqua matter,” the letter states.

The U.S. Department of Justice also is monitoring the local investigation into the shooting, said Alejandro Miyar, a spokesman for the department.

“We would evaluate it after the conclusion of the investigation, what action we’d take,” Miyar said.

Ben Holloman Jr., Fuqua’s defense attorney, filed a motion earlier in November to move the trial out of district 9-A, which includes Caswell and Person counties. Holloman said that Fuqua would not be able to receive a fair and impartial trial because of pretrial publicity.

Fuqua’s next court appearance is Dec. 15.