How a mother’s quest for truth about son’s death ignited probe into NC troopers
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Investigation into NC troopers after fatal crash
Tyrone Mason, 31, died after his car slammed into a concrete barrier on Capital Boulevard near Wake Forest Road in Raleigh the early hours of Oct. 7. A Highway Patrol trooper, after talking with his supervisor, did not immediately disclose that he had pursued Mason before the crash. Mason’s mother says she was told no officer chased her son before he died. What she learned on her own launched a state investigation into the officers’ behavior.
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Mere hours after police told Henrietta Mason that her son had died in a single-car crash in Raleigh, she knew someone was lying.
The Durham mother was asleep on the couch with her 3-year-old granddaughter when two Raleigh police officers steadily knocked on her door around 3 a.m. on Oct. 7. Her son, Tyrone Mason, 31, had died in his 2018 Black Chevrolet Malibu on Capital Boulevard about 30 minutes before, they said.
Later that morning, Mason called a number on a card the officers left to ask a question: Who found my son?
It was a Highway Patrol trooper, an officer who answered the phone said.
“Was the state trooper chasing him?” she remembers asking.
No, the officer said, the trooper spotted his crashed car while passing by, she said.
Immediately, Mason didn’t believe that. She knew her son to be a careful driver who didn’t like to speed. But he’d been scared of police sirens since he was a kid and tended to bolt when he heard them.
“He’s always had that anxiety,” Mason told The News & Observer in an interview.
But for months, no one believed the mother. Even after she brought a man to Raleigh police who said he had heard a police siren right before hearing Tyrone’s Malibu slam into a concrete barrier on Capital Boulevard that night. Police wouldn’t share the name of the trooper, she said.
“I kept running into a brick wall. I felt like no one cared to even look into it,” Mason said.
But Mason never gave up. As a result, a state trooper and his supervisor are under criminal investigation.
And very soon, the public will see videos of what really happened between law enforcement and her son that night.
Search warrants first to detail alleged lies
On the night Tyrone died, he was trying to connect with his girlfriend, who had told him to pick her up near Capital Boulevard, his mother said.
Tyrone’s Chevrolet Malibu left the road, traveled across the grass median and entered southbound lanes before crashing into a barrier, crumpling the black car near the overpass, police documents say.
Warrant applications submitted to a judge months after the fatal crash indicate that Mason had reason to suspect someone was lying.
State Trooper Garrett Macario told Raleigh police that he first saw Tyrone’s wrecked car after the crash while driving down Capital Boulevard, according to three State Bureau of Investigation search warrants.
But Macario’s body-camera footage shows that wasn’t true, search warrants state. Instead, Macario attempted to pull Tyrone over, reported the crash to Raleigh police and called his supervisor Sgt. Matthew Morrision for advice, the warrants say.
Morrison told Macario not to share any information about him pursuing Tyrone, the warrants state.
“Sgt. Morrison told trooper Macario that the traffic accident was RPD’s problem,” the warrants say.
But for months, all of that was hidden from Mason and her family.
Three deaths within a year
Mason, 52, was already grieving before Raleigh police knocked on her door. Her mother had died in February 2024. She lost her husband that August.
Adding the death of a child could easily break a person, but not Mason, a mother to five and a grandmother to seven.
Tyrone, her middle child, was the one who pushed all of them to chase their dreams, she said. A high school athlete who wrestled at Orange High School, Tyrone went on to start car repair, towing and other businesses.
Tyrone had four living children, ages 5 to 11, and a toddler who died in 2018. The death dampened his spirit, his mother said, but didn’t extinguish it.
“In everything that he does, he takes it to heart and he goes with it,” Mason said during an interview in her living room, surrounded by photos of her son.
After two balloon releases in Tyrone’s memory, people gave Mason blown-up photos of her son. A life-size cardboard cutout of Tyrone wearing the broad smile he was known for stands over a makeshift corner shrine.
‘They chased that boy’
Three days after the crash, a Raleigh police officer identified as K.S. Spaulding applied for a search warrant to search Tyrone’s car and pull information from its data system to see how fast it was traveling before the crash.
Tyrone appeared to be going over the 45 mph speed limit traveling outbound on Capital Boulevard, when he over corrected and lost control of the car entering the curve near the Wake Forest Road bridge, Spaulding wrote in a warrant application before the car was searched.
After the crash, Raleigh officers found a “fictitious” 60-day paper license tag on the car and about an ounce and a half of marijuana in the trunk, Spaulding also wrote.
No witnesses were located, the warrant states, and no surveillance footage was found.
Police told Mason the same thing, but she was skeptical that there was no way to confirm what happened. “I started doing my own investigation,” she said.
Mason and her children made multiple trips to Raleigh’s Capital Boulevard, going from business to business, asking if they had video from Oct. 7 at 2:30 a.m. Store owners said the footage had already been automatically erased.
In early November, a man approached Tyrone’s girlfriend at a local restaurant and shared his condolences.
James Jaime, 35, also told her that he had been outside a bar on Capital Boulevard waiting for an Uber the night of Tyrone’s crash. Jaime said he heard the entire incident.
“They chased that boy,” he said he told Tyrone’s girlfriend.
Mason called and begged Jaime to share what he saw and heard the night her son died.
“Sir, can I take you to the Raleigh Police Department?” she remembered asking. “They won’t even investigate the state trooper because they said there was no chase.”
When Mason called, Jaime was late for work at Lakeside Kitchen at N.C. State University, but he agreed to go anyway, he said during an interview.
“That’s a mom, bro. She deserves answers,” he said.
At the Raleigh police headquarters, Jaime wrote and signed a statement that described hearing a police siren, cars accelerating and then a bang.
“The police siren was cut off,” the statement read.
Jaime’s statement didn’t seem to shift Raleigh’s investigation, Mason said.
Helping to assist with ‘peace of mind’
After bringing Jaime to police in November, Mason started emailing and calling anyone and everyone she thought could help: elected officials, the NAACP and police internal affairs investigators.
After she found an article online by Raleigh attorney Sean Cecil on how civilians can get police videos, she called him.
At first he didn’t want to get involved, Cecil told The News & Observer. He had a trial approaching and was skeptical that a trooper would lie. But he found it unusual that Raleigh police refused to give a grieving mother the trooper’s name. And he couldn’t tell this mother no.
“To give you peace of mind as a mother, I’ll just help you out,” Mason said he told her.
Initially, the Highway Patrol said Mason could see the video at their office on Blue Ridge Road, she said. On her way there in December, a Highway Patrol supervisor called her cell phone and said the trooper had admitted to chasing her son that night, she said.
Mason was too distraught to enter the office, she said. Instead, Cecil filed a formal request in court on Dec. 19 so she could watch it at home.
An email to the SBI
Through all of this, Mason relied on her son Sanchez Knowles, 30, who called her every day, and her only daughter, who reminded Mason that she isn’t the kind of mother that gives up.
She continued to juggle multiple jobs, including her nearly 30-year career selling medical supplies for Gurley’s Medical Supply. Her boss Danny Gurley gave her flexibility to continue searching for answers, she said. It was his brother, Tony, who suggested she reach out to the SBI, she said.
On Dec. 23, Mason sent an email to the SBI outlining all of her concerns, along with documents she had gathered.
C. Bell, the assistant special agent in charge of the SBI district that includes Raleigh, called and asked Mason if she could come to the office right away.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mason said she replied.
In the agent’s office, Mason told her story. For the first time, she said, a law enforcement official listened.
“She not only wrote down what I said, she recorded everything,” Mason said.
After the interview, Bell advised Mason to go tell her story to the Wake District Attorney’s Office, which she did about a week later, she said. By then, the SBI had also reached out to District Attorney Lorrin Freeman, who started gathering information for a criminal investigation.
By early January, Freeman had reviewed the Highway Patrol and Raleigh police videos and started dismissing about 200 of the trooper and his supervisor’s traffic and driving while intoxicated cases, due to concerns about their credibility, she said.
Highway Patrol officials placed Macario and Morrison on administrative leave on Jan. 10, a spokesperson said.
On Jan. 31, Mason watched the Highway Patrol video with her children in her living room.
“It was horrible,” she said. Her attorneys advised her not to discuss the content of the videos, she said.
Mason has added national civil rights attorneys Bakari Sellers and Ben Crump to her legal team.
Just last Friday, a Wake County judge ruled that all police video related to the crash that killed her son could be released to Raleigh police and news organizations, which sought it, and to the public at large.
The Highway Patrol declined to respond to Mason’s accusations, citing the ongoing criminal and internal investigations.
When asked how Raleigh police responded to Mason, department spokesman Christopher Gay said Police Chief Rico Boyce is looking into the investigation but couldn’t provide a comment right away.
Mason said she is relieved that everyone will soon see what she fought too hard to uncover.
What happened to her and her family should teach the community a valuable lesson about the need for police transparency, she said.
“I want the world to know this is what goes on,” she said. “If I didn’t know my child and know that something wasn’t right from the beginning, they would have gotten away with it.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was updated on May 21, after Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman released a report on the investigation into the troopers’ actions that stated she would not file criminal charges. The report confirmed that Trooper Garrett Macario did not disclose that he had chased Tyrone Mason to officers who first arrived where Mason’s car crashed but states he did tell one Raleigh officer before leaving, as well as a Raleigh police captain who called him. The report criticizes Macario and his supervisor, Sergeant Matthew Morrison for “dishonesty.” Due to problems with their credibility, the Wake County district attorney will not prosecute cases dependent on their policing, it states.
Virginia Bridges covers criminal justice in the Triangle and across North Carolina for The News & Observer. Her work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The N&O maintains full editorial control of its journalism.
This story was originally published May 20, 2025 at 9:39 AM.
