RALEIGH, N.C. — The husband of a woman slain in the mass shooting in a Raleigh neighborhood is angry at what he calls a lack of appropriate safety.
What You Need To Know
A fiancé of a victim shot and killed during the October mass shooting put blame at the feet of the Raleigh City Council
Residents did not receive a digital alert the night of the incident
Angel Faggins, who lives in the Hedingham neighborhood, was walking her dog when the shooting began
Tuesday night at a public Raleigh City Council meeting Robert Steele was candid.
“This one thing I lay directly at the feet of the city of Raleigh and Wake County. There is no ongoing emergency alert system for violent crimes in this city,” Steele said.
Steele is the fiancé of Mary Marshall, one of the five victims shot and killed during the Hedingham mass shooting on Oct. 13.
He is not the only person from the community where the violent crimes happened who is upset about not receiving a warning in real time.
No one living in Raleigh city limits received alerts the night of the shooting.
Many people who live in Hedingham said they were out walking their dogs that afternoon when investigators with the Raleigh Police Department said a teenager opened fire.
Angel Faggins is one of those people. As Faggins does on many days, the aerospace contractor walks her dog, Juno.
“It’s a very nice neighborhood. I moved here a year ago and loved it,” Faggins said. “The environment, the people, the community. The sense of community we have here, I love it.”
She moved from southern California in July 2021.
“In Los Angeles, you get lost in the masses,” she said.
Up until mid-October, this part of Raleigh was quiet and peaceful.
The mother of three said she didn’t know what was happening when RPD cruisers sped into the neighborhood with blue lights flashing and blaring sirens. Had there been an alert about an active shooter situation, she would have never left her home.
“Here they didn’t do that. We just walked out into it like what is going on and then (we were) not notified until hours later that, hey, we should probably be staying inside. It made it difficult. Scary because if I had been in that area, I would have been right there. Right there,” she said in reference to the shooting.
RPD detectives said the shooting began in the streets of the neighborhood before spilling over into the nearby Neuse River Greenway. The greenway is part of an elaborate citywide walkway system many who live in the area enjoy frequently.
“For me there was no news flash or alert put out on my phone or anything,” she said.
Faggins said her youngest child was a classmate of the 15-year-old at Knightdale High School who is accused of being the shooter.
“For him, he’s like, ‘Holy cow I left Los Angeles and had something like this happen here.’ He was pretty down for a while,” Faggins said.
Most of the messages people who live in the neighborhood received about the shooting came through either a Town Square Community Portal or via tweets from the Raleigh Police Department. The RPD Twitter account didn’t share the pieces of information until almost an hour after the shooting began, according to the timestamp.
There are differences in standard notifications like Amber and Silver alerts. Those in particular pertain to when a child or elderly person is missing and are relayed through a federal database. When it comes to weather-related events, for Wake County in particular, they are released through a digital alert system called ReadyWake.
Spectrum News 1 emailed city leaders about why a mass alert wasn’t sent out to residents.
According to a Raleigh City spokesperson, “This is something we will be looking into as we move forward. City leaders and the command staff with the Raleigh Police Department will perform a comprehensive after-action review of all the steps taken during this incident, with the goal being to ensure communications with the community is a top priority."