Arrest made in Alamance drug stash house robbery where 2 men killed
A Winston-Salem man was arrested Monday in connection with an April shootout at a drug cartel's stash house in Alamance County in which a charter school teacher and another man were killed, authorities said.
Posted — UpdatedGar-yon-ded-weh Stepney, 41, was taken into custody in Greensboro by Alamance County deputies and U.S. marshals and was charged with one count of first-degree murder.
A gun battle took place at a mobile home in the Green Level community east of Burlington in the early hours of April 8 in which Barney Dale Harris was killed, authorities said.
Harris, a teacher at Union Academy, a charter school in Monroe, his brother-in-law, Steven Alexander Stewart Jr., and Stepney had tracked the activities of the Sinaloa cartel moving drugs from Mexico through North Carolina in order to find the group's drug stash houses, authorities said.
They broke into the mobile home on Wyatt Road and later killed Alonso Beltran Lara execution-style, with two shots to the back of his head, authorities said. A kilogram of cocaine was found in a bag near Lara's body, and the home had been ransacked, authorities said.
Investigators used footage from security cameras in the area and information from Harris' phone to track Stewart to his home in Wadesboro, and a search there turned up firearms and other evidence from the crime scene, authorities said.
The case remains under investigation.
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