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Prosecutors abruptly rest in Raleigh murder trial

After calling just 10 witnesses over a day and a half, prosecutors on Friday rested their case in the murder trial of a Raleigh man who admits to shooting a man in his front yard in 2016.

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By
Matthew Burns
, WRAL.com senior producer/politics editor
RALEIGH, N.C. — After calling just 10 witnesses over a day and a half, prosecutors on Friday rested their case in the murder trial of a Raleigh man who admits to shooting a man in his front yard in 2016.

Chad Cameron Copley, 40, is charged with murder in the Aug. 7, 2016, death of 20-year-old Kouren-Rodney Bernard Thomas.

Thomas was leaving a house party down the street from Copley's home on Singleleaf Lane when he was shot. Investigators said Copley fired a shotgun through a window from inside his garage.

In a 911 call played for jurors on Thursday, Copley complained about "hoodlums" in his neighborhood racing cars and vandalizing property, and he told the dispatcher that he was a member of the neighborhood watch and was "locked and loaded" and planning to "secure the neighborhood."

Before the dispatcher picked up the call, Copley can be heard in the recording telling someone, "I'm going to kill him."

Kouren-Rodney Bernard Thomas

The abrupt end to the prosecution's case caught Copley's attorneys off-guard, and they asked Superior Court Judge Michael O'Foghludha to force some of the 69 potential witnesses that the prosecution didn't call to testify, including Raleigh police Detective J.B. Stroud, the lead investigator in the case, to come to court next week so the defense can question them.

"If they're not going to call their own lead detective in this case, we're going to need to call their lead detective," defense attorney Raymond Tarlton said. "If we had even anticipated that something this unusual would have happened, we would have put Detective Stroud under subpoena."

"It's not my responsibility to alert them who I am calling [as witnesses]," Assistant District Attorney Patrick Latour responded.

O'Foghludha said he won't require anybody not under subpoena to attend the trial. The defense attorneys can subpoena Stroud, if they want, he said.

The judge also denied a defense motion to dismiss the case for lack of evidence and said the evidence presented so far doesn't support Copley's stance that he cannot be prosecuted for using deadly force because he feared imminent death or bodily harm or someone forcibly entered his home.

Before resting, prosecutors called three witnesses Friday.

Carla Foran, a forensic technician with the City County Bureau of Identification, detailed evidence collected from the scene, including a spent shotgun shell found in Copley's garage. She also found a handgun under the passenger seat of a car parked nearby.

Foran said there was a window screen in Copley's front yard, but there was no way someone from outside could have pulled it off the second-floor window.

"There were no obvious signs of tampering or forced entry [to the home]," she said.

Raleigh police Detective Eric Emser said he found a 12-gauge shotgun leaning against the wall in the downstairs hallway of Copley's house, a rifle in the hallway upstairs and a box of ammunition for the shotgun on a bedroom nightstand.

On cross-examination, Emser said one of the party hosts said they believed some people at the party to be gang members and that the hosts thought they might have been involved in the shooting after they were asked to leave.

Dr. Julie Hull, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Thomas, said the shot that killed him went through his right arm into his torso, where it severed his aorta and tore through his kidney and stomach.

On Thursday, two of Copley's neighbors disputed his claims that the party was raucous and that partygoers were racing cars and vandalizing property. One also noted that the Neuse Crossing neighborhood doesn't have an organized neighborhood watch.

Some people at the party, including two of Thomas' friends, said the gathering was fairly boring and that they never saw anyone with guns.

Barry Carroll, who has since retired as a Wake County deputy, said he confronted Copley in the garage and that Copley admitted to him that he had fired the shot that hit Thomas.

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