It’s time for a fact check of North Carolina politics. If you've turned on the TV lately, you've probably seen a particular pair of ads attacking former Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. In each ad, a father describes how his child was killed before the ad implies Cooper, while Governor, had a hand in releasing their killers from prison. For more, Paul Specht of WRAL joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry.
Marshall Terry: Who’s behind these ads?
Paul Specht: These ads were paid for by a super PAC known as the Senate Leadership Fund. Earlier this year, they announced that they plan on spending $71 million on this particular race, helping Republican Michael Whatley defeat Democrat Roy Cooper.
Terry: Let’s talk about the fathers in these ads. Who are they and what happened to their children?
Specht: Stephen Federico is the father of Logan Federico. She was killed in Columbia, South Carolina, last year. Then there's Ronald Hayes. His son Shemar was killed in Charlotte a couple of years ago, and Hayes' killer has been convicted and is in prison right now. Federico's suspected killer is in jail awaiting trial in South Carolina.
Terry: And we'll get more into the South Carolina component in just a moment. First, both ads refer to Cooper as governor, allowing the release of 3,500 inmates. What is that claim and how does it relate to the men charged in each killing?
Specht: First, we should point out the ads are basically designed the same way. They feature testimony from the grieving fathers about their children who were killed, and then it cuts immediately to a claim about Roy Cooper agreeing to release inmates from prison. The ad doesn't specifically say Cooper released the suspected killers in those cases. But someone watching these ads can certainly draw that conclusion based on how the ads are framed.
Neither suspected killer has anything to do with the legal settlement that these ads are referring to, which the Cooper administration struck back in 2021 as part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Civil rights groups sued the state in 2020 saying, ‘you're not keeping inmates safe enough, you're not doing enough distancing.’
The Cooper administration argued in court that they in fact were keeping inmates safe enough. A Wake County Superior judge in a preliminary ruling said that he believed the civil rights groups were likely to win their case.
In February of 2021, the Cooper administration agreed as part of this legal settlement to release 3,500 inmates. However, the two people in these cases that you see in the Senate Leadership Fund ads have no relation to Cooper or that 2021 settlement.
Terry: So to be clear, the two people in question in the killings of the children mentioned in these ads were not among the 3,500 inmates Cooper released. So the central implication in both ads did not happen.
Specht: That's right. I spoke to both dads. Mr. Federico said he thinks the ad is fair, he said, because the ad, if you listen closely to what they say — it never specifically blames Cooper for his daughter's death and neither does the one featuring Ronald Hayes. But certainly people could come to that conclusion based on how all the details are presented. Mr. Federico said he believes his daughter was killed because the suspected killer in her case should have been behind bars already.
He is a critic of that 2021 legal settlement agreed to by the Cooper administration. To paraphrase his comments, he basically said, ‘I'm against all soft on crime policies. That includes those in South Carolina and that includes those that I believe were in North Carolina under the Cooper administration.’
Terry: And again though, I just want to make it clear, Logan Federico was killed in South Carolina by an inmate who had been released in South Carolina where Roy Cooper obviously had no authority, right?
Specht: Correct. And Mr. Federico basically said to me, again paraphrasing, soft-on-crime policies were partially responsible for his daughter's death; his daughter's case is an example of what can happen under soft-on-crime policies in other states, which he claims also existed under Cooper. I'm paraphrasing his view, based on our conversation and why he thinks that ad is fair.
Terry: Each of these fathers had a different reaction to the ads. You've already talked about Mr. Federico's. What about Mr. Hayes’s?
Specht: Mr. Hayes now says that he feels like he was misled when interviewing and discussing his son's death. He says his comments in that Senate Leadership Fund ad do not represent the message that he was trying to get out to the public. He told me in a phone interview that he thought he was speaking to them about gun violence. He thought his comments would be included in some sort of public campaign against gun violence. He was surprised that his comments were used to attack Cooper. He said he's a Democrat, he plans on voting for Roy Cooper, and that had he known how his words would be used, he would not have agreed to that interview.
Terry: What did the group behind these ads, the Senate Leadership Fund, have to say?
Specht: The Senate Leadership Fund told me they communicated with him openly and honestly about their intentions. They sent me text messages showing their interactions with Mr. Hayes agreeing not only to the ad, but to a quote about Roy Cooper that they included in their press release about these ads. These text messages show Hayes agreeing to it. I took their texts and everything to Mr. Hayes, and I said they're claiming that you signed off on not only this ad, but a quote about Roy Cooper that was included in their press release about the ads. Mr. Hayes said he gets in trouble with his wife all the time for not fully reading things before he signs them and suggested that's what happened in this case.
Terry: You didn't assign a rating to this fact check. Why not?
Specht: These ads don't make a direct claim that Hayes’s or Federico's killers were released by Cooper. They lead people to that conclusion without making that exact claim. Because there's no direct accusation, we did not rate these ads.
These fact checks are a collaboration between PolitiFact and WRAL.
