GOP Ad Attacks Democratic NC Senate Candidate for a Murder Committed in South Carolina

Screenshot via X.

An ad released by a Republican PAC bashed former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D), now the state’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, over a murder last year by a career criminal.

There are, however, some significant factual issues with the ad.

Namely, that the murderer was a South Carolina man, whose criminal record had been racked up in South Carolina, was released from a South Carolina jail, and committed the murder mentioned in the ad also in South Carolina.

The video ad was shared by the Senate Leadership Fund, a PAC that supports Republican Senate candidates, on Wednesday.

“NEW AD,” the caption read, declaring that Cooper’s “reckless policies and decision to release 3,500 violent criminals put every family in North Carolina at risk” and “Stephen’s daughter Logan was a casualty of an agenda.”

In the video, Stephen Federico shares the heartbreaking story of how his 22-year-old daughter Logan Federico was murdered during a home invasion committed by Alexander Dickey.

“Logan was a casualty of an agenda,” said Federico in the ad. “Roy Cooper let 3,500 criminals out on the street. Eighteen of ’em were murderers. Forty years of Roy Cooper’s enough.”

At one point in the ad, as shown in the screenshot at the top of this article, an image of an article by WCNC, Charlotte’s NBC affiliate, appears on the screen, along with a mugshot of Dickey. The dateline on the article says “CHARLOTTE, N.C.”

WCNC covered the story, including the May 3, 2025 murder, Dickey’s arrest and trial, and multiple interviews with Stephen Federico. As these reports note, the crime itself took place in Columbia, South Carolina, about a 90-mile drive from Charlotte. Logan Federico was in town visiting friends at the University of South Carolina when she was killed.

The image from the WCNC article shown in the PAC’s ad, however, faded out the text about the murder being during a “home invasion in Columbia, South Carolina” so that “South” is barely visible and “Carolina” is not seen at all.

Prior to the murder, Dickey’s record had included about 40 criminal charges and 11 arrests, but those took place in South Carolina. When he was last released before killing Logan Federico, that was during the term of South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican.

Whatley has also used the story of Logan Federico’s murder directly on the campaign trail, having her father speak at a recent event and posting the video on social media.

“Roy Cooper has blood on his hands,” Whatley wrote in a tweet, accusing the former governor of “chos[ing] to release back onto North Carolina’s streets…[m]urderers, rapists, and violent felons.”

The post highlighted Stephen Federico’s appearance, saying he had shared a “powerful message” about his daughter who “was killed by a violent repeat criminal, to expose the deadly impacts of Cooper’s actions.”

It turns out that the accusations in Whatley’s post and the SLF PAC ad about Cooper “releasing” thousands of criminals omit some critical context as well.

Cooper did not order the prisoner release on his own; these were not standard pardons or commutations commonly issued by governors. Instead, it was the result of a settlement of a lawsuit filed against North Carolina by the North Carolina NAACP, ACLU of North Carolina, Disability Rights NC, and other groups over the crowded prison conditions during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Under the terms of the February 2021 settlement, 3,500 prisoners were released early over a six-month period, out of the roughly 28,000 to 32,000 people who were imprisoned in the state at the time. Cooper’s administration had fought the lawsuit until a judge ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits, and the state worried proceeding to trial risked a court-ordered release of far more prisoners.

Those worries do not appear to have been unfounded. Local media at the time reported the advocacy groups that filed the lawsuit had been seeking releases far greater than the 3,500 prisoners in the settlement, with some estimates as high as 18,000 or about 60 percent of all North Carolina prisoners.

The prisoner release and a criminal justice reform task force report from Cooper’s time as governor have been politicized during the campaign, with Republicans accusing Cooper of releasing DeCarlos Brown Jr., the man who fatally stabbed Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train.

That claim has been debunked by multiple media outlets, including The Charlotte Observer and Politifact, which found that Brown “had served his full sentence at the time of his 2020 release,” and further noted that Brown’s release had come three months before Cooper’s task force had released its report.

Cooper is an attorney with a long résumé in Tar Heel State politics, serving for years in the North Carolina legislature, as the state’s Attorney General, and then governor until 2025. He’s maintained a solid lead over Whatley in recent polling.

This article has been updated with additional information.

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