Wake County man federally charged with threatening Advance Auto Parts executives
A Wake County man was arrested last week after allegedly threatening to kill Advance Auto Parts executives and their families, officials announced Friday.
Edward Scott Huffman, 46, of Wendell is charged with transmitting a threat in interstate commerce, U.S. Attorney Michael F. Easley Jr. said in a news release.
The charge is tied to a message sent Dec. 6 through the Raleigh-based company’s “Contact Us” form on its website, according to the arrest warrant.
The message Huffman is accused of sending said he is an expert sniper who lives in Raleigh. It gave the company until Christmas to improve its app and website or he would hunt down and murder its executives and their families.
Advance Auto Parts employees “recognized similarities between the threatening submission via webform and submissions via Huffman’s AAP profile ... approximately 20 minutes prior to the threat,” the criminal complaint states. Screenshots of those submissions show at least five expletive-laden messages Huffman allegedly sent to the company’s chatbot.
The security director for Advance Auto Parts contacted the FBI the same day, according to the complaint. Members of the FBI’s Raleigh-Durham Safe Streets Task Force reached out to the Wendell Police Department, which said Huffman was known to have access to firearms.
Frustrated with website
Court records show Wendell police charged Huffman with 10 counts of communicating threats, but those charges were dismissed Monday because the federal government took over the case.
Huffman was arrested on the federal charge Jan. 2, according to court records. In an interview with federal investigators, Huffman reportedly admitted sending the threat, claiming he did so because he was frustrated with the company’s website and felt it would get the site administrators’ attention, the complaint states.
“Furthermore, Huffman was struggling with personal family matters, giving the example of not being informed where his family would be having Thanksgiving dinner, which increased Huffman’s overall anger,” the complaint said. “Huffman acknowledged the seriousness of the threat and apologized for threatening to murder members of AAP leadership.”
Huffman told law enforcement he wasn’t a sniper and didn’t own any firearms, though when he consented to a search of his cellphone, investigators found a photo he’d taken of a rifle with a mounted scope and a text message saying he would have murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson if he’d been given $50,000 and a rifle that couldn’t be traced back to him.
Out-of-state data centers
Though Huffman and Advance Auto Parts are based in Wake County, Huffman faces an interstate charge because Salesforce, the company that maintains customer messages for Advance Auto Parts, only has data centers in Arizona and Virginia, not North Carolina, the complaint states.
“Whether targeting a kid in a classroom or a boss in a boardroom, we won’t normalize violent threats meant to intimidate workers or strike fear in families,” Easley said in the press release. “Threats to kill are not how we resolve differences in America, and it’s a federal crime.”
If convicted, Huffman faces up to five years in prison.
This story was originally published January 10, 2025 at 1:50 PM.
