911 calls released in pawn shop shooting

“I can tell they stole something, because they were just running really fast, and they got into the car and just sped off,” she added.

Police said Kyle Harris, 19, was working at Cumberland Pawn Shop, at 713 Grove St. Saturday, when he was shot and killed around 5:30 p.m.

Two people, Cedric Theodis Hobbs Jr., 29, and Alexis Mattocks, 20, were arrested several hours later in Washington, D.C., and charged in the case.

Investigators have said the crime was random and that Hobbs and Mattocks likely went to the store because they were in need of a car after the SUV they were driving broke down. They fled the crime scene in Harris’ silver Saturn Ion.

In a second call released Monday, a store employee told a 911 operator that he ran out the back of the pawn shop to a neighboring beauty supply store to call police.

“We just got robbed,” the caller said. “Somebody came in with a gun and shot one of our employees.”

Friends said Harris, a 2009 graduate of Cape Fear High School, had been working at the pawn shop for more than a year to save money to go to school.

He was a sophomore sociology student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Chancellor Linda Brady said in a news release Monday.

Friends said he often worked at the Fayetteville store on the weekends to help pay his way through school and to look after his mother.

He hoped to go on to law school.

“He was confident, articulate, inquisitive – the kind of student professors hope to have in their classes,” his sociology professor, Jenifer Hamil-Luker, said in a statement. “The last time I spoke with Kyle, before he headed off for a tour of law schools, we talked about his ambition to work in the criminal justice system.

“It pains me greatly that, instead of becoming a champion for justice, as he aspired to be, Kyle was a victim of a senseless, violent, cruel act that took him away much too soon,” she continued.

Hobbs and Mattocks, who are also wanted for questioning in a death investigation in Georgia, are still in Washington, D.C., awaiting extradition back to North Carolina.

They are charged with first-degree murder, armed robbery, second-degree kidnapping and conspiracy to commit armed robbery.

Fayetteville police who questioned Hobbs said he confessed to the shooting and to another shooting in Georgia. Mattocks was not talking, authorities said.

McDuffie County, Ga., investigators plan to interview the two later this week about the death of Rondriako Burnett, 22, who was found along a road Saturday morning.