Greg Childress, NC Newsline

Grieving father claims Republicans 'swindled' him into bogus attack ad

Ronald Hayes was cautious when he talked to a reporter this week about the political TV advertisement he appears in, talking about the death of his son Shemar, a college football player who was murdered in Charlotte in March 2024 at age 23.

“I have already been swindled into an ad that was about politics, which I don’t want to be about,” Hayes told NC Newsline on Monday.

Despite his intentions, the ad has landed him squarely in the middle of one of the nation’s most watched races.

Hayes says he was tricked by the Senate Leadership Fund, a well-heeled Republican political action committee.

Hayes says he agreed to talk to the video crew about his son’s murder because he thought he would be featured in an ad against gun violence. But the ad is actually aimed at smearing the political record of former Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.

The TV ad Hayes appeared in has been viewed more than 25 million times on Youtube. It’s part of a $17 million advertising campaign targeting Cooper, who faces Republican Michael Whatley in November.

The ad falsely implies that Cooper released Shemar’s killer from prison early as part of a legal settlement during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Tyzavian Smith, the man convicted of killing Shemar, was 18 at the time Shemar was murdered in 2024, was not in prison, and had no prior adult record.

NC Newsline could not reach the Senate Leadership Fund for comment. The group has also been accused of using a murder committed by a South Carolina man to attack Cooper as soft on crime.

“The commercial looks as if I’m trying to sway North Carolinians from voting the way that they want to vote, and that wasn’t my agenda,” Hayes said. “I wanted to let the community know about gun violence and about my son being murdered.”

“Once I saw the commercial, I called [the ad makers] back and I asked them again, and they stated again that they are independent,” Hayes said. “I told them that I felt that this was deceiving, it was conniving and it was sneaky how they used me and my family to get out their word.”

Hayes said he’s now being stopped on the street by people wanting to know if he’s the “guy in the commercial” and whether he’s Democrat or Republican.

“What difference does that make?” said Hayes, a Democrat. “The agenda was not political. It was to get my son’s name said and to speak on gun violence.”

North Carolina’s Senate race no longer a toss-up, top forecasters say, with Cooper in the lead

Hayes said he plans to speak with Cooper to let him know that his intent was not to harm his campaign. He said he doesn’t have anything against Cooper and has “voted for him in the past.”

“I want to turn this tragedy into something beautiful that can possibly make a change,” Hayes said. “I want my son’s name to be able to be used to make this change.”

Hayes has published a book, titled “Living Through Loss: A Journey of Healing and Hope,” to share the story of Shemar’s death, but also how he lived his 23 years of life. He said the ad’s producers recorded him and took pictures of him talking about that book and others he’s written, but did not include them in the ad.

“That was not their agenda,” Hayes said. “They could care less than a damn about me and my books.”

The still-grieving father said he blames his son’s death on what he says are weak gun laws that are ineffective in keeping guns out of the hands of people who would use them to harm others.

A statewide anti-gun violence group agrees with Hayes, and is condemning the political ad and the Republican PAC that paid for it. North Carolinians Against Gun Violence says it is outraged at the commercial, which it says twisted a grieving father’s pain for political gain.

“Losing a child is every parent’s worst nightmare,” said Becky Ceartas, executive director of NCGV. “Every survivor of gun violence deserves to be treated with respect and care if they decide to relive the most horrible day of their lives by telling you their story.”

NCGV called on television stations across the state to pull the political ad from the airwaves.

“Our organization works with survivors of gun violence throughout the state, and we have witnessed how hard and traumatic it is for them to tell their stories,” said Ceartas. “It requires an immense amount of trust and faith that the person you are sharing this deeply personal experience with will treat it with dignity and respect.”

NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Laura Leslie for questions: info@ncnewsline.com.

GOP in danger as most voters in key swing state admit Trump's first year left them hurting

North Carolina residents of all political stripes are worried about higher prices and say they’re having difficulty affording regular monthly expenses, according to a recent Catawba-YouGov poll.

Sixty-three percent of North Carolina residents said prices are higher than a year ago. Meanwhile, 15% said prices are lower, with 22% saying they are the same.

About 40% of Republicans said prices are higher than when Trump took office. A much higher percentage of Democrats — 83% — said prices are higher, while 62% of independents said they are higher.

The survey comes just weeks after the completion of President Trump’s first year in office. The president campaigned on a promise to bring prices down and continues to insist that his policies are lowering prices, although the inflation rate has continued to rise steadily over the past year.

Nationally, concerns about affordability are even higher than they are in North Carolina. In a national Catawba-YouGov survey conducted in December, 77% of Americans said prices have been higher since Trump took office, 14% said they were the same and 8% said prices were lower.

In that national survey, nine of 10 Democrats said prices were higher, as well as 78% of independents and 62% of Republicans.

The percentage of Republicans who said prices are higher was a little surprising, Michael Bitzer, professor of politics and history at Catawba College, told NC Newsline Friday.

“It seems like on so many issues and policy dynamics, Republicans usually fall in lockstep behind the president whereas Democrats are on the complete opposite end,” Bitzer said.

He said on some questions of affordability, Republicans appear to be responding to what they’re experiencing versus the messaging coming from the White House.

Bitzer said it’s too soon to say whether affordability concerns will impact midterm elections. The picture should be clearer by late summer, he said.

“We know that for midterm elections, the top two factors when it comes to a voter’s decision are usually how they view the president and how they view economic pocketbook issues,” Bitzer said.

Top concerns for NC residents

In the recent North Carolina survey, 70% of North Carolinians said housing is unaffordable. Six out of 10 of Republicans — a majority — feel that way, along with 68% of independents and three-quarters of Democrats.

“I think that [housing] has been a much longer term issue, but it’s an impact that has direct day-to-day consequences along with things like groceries, healthcare and cars as well,” Bitzer said. “These are things that people rely on on a daily basis and a majority of North Carolinians are saying this is not where they want prices and affordability to be.”

Vehicle affordability was North Carolinians’ second-highest concern. Nearly two-thirds said cars are unaffordable, including 60% of Republicans, 64% of independents and 67% of Democrats.

Affordable healthcare and insurance are also major concerns, with 63% of North Carolinians saying they are unaffordable. Among Republicans, 54% say they are unaffordable, while two-thirds of Democrats and independents agreed.

Fifty-three percent of respondents said energy and utility costs are unaffordable, while 51% said basic goods such as groceries, personal care items and household goods are unaffordable.

The Catawba-YouGov online poll of 1,000 North Carolina residents was conducted between January 13-22. The survey’s overall margin of error is plus or minus 3.69%.

'What MAGA is about': Roy Cooper slams Trump for questioning Harris' race

Former President Donald Trump is attempting to divide the nation by falsely questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’ race, Gov. Roy Cooper said on Thursday.

“He’s [Trump] showing us who he is,” Cooper said during an interview with reporters following a reproductive freedom rally in Durham to support Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Trump questioned Harris’ raced during an interview this week at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention in Chicago.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now, she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said during the NABJ interview. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

Meanwhile, Harris called Trump’s false remarks about her race the “same old show; the divisiveness and the disrespect.”

Harris attended Howard University, one of the nation’s most prominent historically Black colleges and universities. While there, she pledged the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. And as a U.S. senator, Harris was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Cooper said the attack on Harris — her father is Jamaican and her mother is an Indian — reminds him of the tactic Trump used against former president Barack Obama when he repeatedly questioned Obama’s citizenship and birthplace.

“This is what MAGA is about,” Cooper said. “I think it’s pretty clear that with young people across this country, with people of color, everybody who wants to have a diverse society where we can all work together for the better of our country, they need to support Kamala Harris this fall.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., conceded that Trump’s remarks were likely a distraction, ABC News reported.

“I think it shifts away from the discussion I want to focus on, but it may very well be that we have a difference of opinions about what is going to move the voters,” Tillis said. “I for one think it’s the failure on the economy the failure on the border and the failure on national security.”

NC state lawmaker was angered by colleague’s racist comments — but chose to forgive

A white, Republican colleague’s question about whether Rep. Abe Jones was admitted to Harvard University in 1970 because he was a minority and a track athlete was only the second time the Wake County Democrat had experienced such an encounter.

The first incident occurred several years ago during a party at UNC Chapel Hill when a “half-lit” white woman who had been rejected by Harvard expressed disbelief that Jones, who is Black, had gone to the prestigious Ivy League school.

The woman implied that minorities such as Jones had stolen seats that she and other whites deserved.

“Nobody says that to you unless they’re drunk or stupid and she wasn’t stupid, so I think that she was half-lit,” Jones told Newsline. “That was the only other time in my life when someone just hit me in the face with it like that.”

Offensive questions from a colleague

The second incident occurred a week ago when Rep. Jeff McNeely, an Iredell County Republican, questioned Jones’ academic achievements during a spirited debate on the House floor. The body was discussing a controversial GOP-backed bill to expand the state’s school voucher program so that North Carolina’s wealthiest families can access the program.

McNeely asked Jones, a former Superior Court judge, if he would have been able to attend Harvard and Harvard Law School if “you were not an athlete or a minority or any of these things, but you were a student trapped in a school that the slowest … in the wild we’ll say the slowest gazelle does not survive but yet the herd moves at that pace, so the brightest child is held back.”

Jones responded: “Harvard had five rankings for their students; one, two, three, four, five. When I graduated from Harvard, I was in rank two, so I earned my place and I did well.”

McNeely later apologized for the ill-advised comments that garnered national attention and were widely condemned as racist.

Jones never received an apology from the soused party-goer in Chapel Hill.

Jones hopes that McNeely’s apology was sincere. He acknowledged being angry and wanting to say something “mean” but took the high road by addressing McNeely’s question about whether he belonged at Harvard.

“I think someone talked to him in between the time he insulted me and apologized,” Jones said. “I accepted just to let him know … everybody can make a mistake. Maybe the mistake wasn’t so much he felt the way he did. The mistake was to say it to me and not know the whole story. He shouldn’t have done that. It was wrong and it was racist.”

The challenges to his academic achievement are like “slaps in my face,” said Jones, who is immensely proud of his academic achievements as a Harvard undergrad and as a Harvard Law School graduate.

“I worked hard at being a good student,” Jones said. “I had good study habits, I have a regimen that I followed, and so that was a slap in my face to say that I didn’t deserve to be there. I was there and I kept up, so I did deserve to be there.”

Here we go again

The idea that Jones was admitted to Harvard because of his race and athletic ability harkens to times before the nation’s political culture wars moved from college campuses to elementary schools.

Then, instead of critical race theory, affirmative action was the conservative buzz word that was used to stoke the anger and fears of whites who were told that elite colleges and universities were unfairly awarding seats to unqualified members of minority groups at the expense of whites in pursuit of meeting diversity goals.

It became an easy sell, especially to prospective students such as the woman rejected by Harvard who questioned whether Jones was qualified to attend the school. How else could she explain Harvard’s decision not to admit her?

For Jones and other minority students attending elite public and private and colleges, white resistance to their admission into such schools was a disturbing reminder of America’s racist past when Black people were denied equal opportunities because of their skin color.

It was also a rejection of the hard-earned academic achievements that propelled many Black students into coveted seats in some of the nation’s best schools.

“What went through my mind was how dare you do that to me?” said Jones, who reminded the woman at the party that all of the Harvard slots belonged to the university, which awarded one to him and passed on her.

McNeely’s remarks have been roundly condemned in progressive circles across the nation. Jones said a half dozen or so Republican lawmakers have also apologized for the inappropriate comments.

A family with a proud record of achievement

To understand how far off-base McNeely’s remarks were about Jones, one would have to understand deeply committed Jones’ family was to education.

“Education was highly valued [in the Jones household], so much so, that when I was growing up, on weeknights, there was no television after Walter Cronkite went off at 7 p.m.,” Jones said. “If you got done with homework early, my dad would say read a book and go to bed.”

Jones’ dad was a college professor who taught at several historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), including St. Augustine’s University in Raleigh.

His grandparents were educators, and his mother became a substitute teacher and teacher’s assistant after she finished rearing seven children.

Five of Jones’ six siblings earned college degrees. Two, including Jones, received degrees from Ivy League schools. A sister earned degrees from Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The only sibling who did not go to college was challenged by autism.

Harvard was not on Jones’ list of colleges in the months before he graduated from Enloe High School in Raleigh. He got there after a chance meeting with a recruiter in town to talk to students a Raleigh’s Broughton High School.

The recruiter finished early and stopped by Enloe en route to the airport and asked the counselor if she knew of any students who would be interested in talking about Harvard.

“He interviewed me for about 30 minutes, took an application out of his brief case and told me to send it in,” Jones said. “That’s how I got to Harvard.”

Until that chance meeting with the Harvard recruiter, Jones had decided to go to either Northwestern University or McNeely’s alma mater, N.C. State University, where he’d already spent time working out with the cross country and track teams.

When the acceptance letter came from Harvard, the family saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Jones’ dad was a Hampton Institute graduate, a small HBCU in Virginia that is now Hampton University and had wanted his son to follow in his footsteps.

“He said you’re going to have to go to Harvard,” Jones said. “That’s an opportunity of a lifetime, so take it.”

Jones was awarded an academic scholarship. Harvard doesn’t award athletic scholarships, Jones said, which runs counter to McNeely’s comments suggesting that he attended the school because he was an athlete.

“Just measure me by the same standards that you measure everybody else and I’ll be just fine,” Jones said. “Don’t put an extra load on me about being Black or being an athlete. That was a cheap shot.”

NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.