Raleigh NAACP calls for federal investigation into Holly Springs man’s conviction
In an impassioned speech outside the North Carolina Legislative Building on Tuesday, the president of the Raleigh-Apex NAACP called for a federal investigation into a Holly Springs man’s lengthy sentence in a Wake County case.
Henderson Atwater, 48, was sentenced in July to a minimum of 49 years and a maximum of 75 years in prison by Wake County Superior Court Judge Keith Gregory on multiple charges tied to pellet gun shootings throughout the county, court records show.
The case has received extensive local coverage tied to Atwater and his attorney’s claims that evidence in the case is flimsy and that prosecutors ignored potentially exculpatory evidence.
After a hung jury led to a mistrial in 2023, Atwater was retried this summer and found guilty on a slew of charges, including shooting into an occupied dwelling/motor vehicle and injury to personal property, by a Wake County jury. Prosecutors dismissed dozens of other similar charges in August and September because Atwater had already received a lengthy sentence in this case, court records show.
In Tuesday’s news conference, Mark S. Vasconcellos accused Holly Springs police of fabricating evidence against Atwater and urged the U.S. Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section to investigate his conviction.
“This case is more than a tragedy for Mr. Atwater,” Vasconcellos said. “It is an indictment of a system that failed at every turn.”
Vasconcellos alleged the only video evidence presented by the Holly Springs Police Department did not show Atwater.
“Nowhere in this four-minute video [do] you find Mr. Atwater,” he said. “If there’s anyone in Raleigh, in Wake County, in North Carolina, in the United States of America, of the 8 billion people on this planet — if there’s one person who can look at this four-minute video and say they see Mr. Atwater, let me know who you are.”
Furthermore, witnesses in the case described a white man as the shooter, Vasconcellos said. Atwater is Black.
“The same officer that turned over the only video that was used to prosecute and convict Henderson said in his report that the subject in the video is a white man,” Vasconcellos said. “The owner of the establishment said the person in the vehicle was a white man. ... Even a victim whose vehicle was shot, she said she turned around and she saw the shooter and it was a white male.”
Expert witnesses who testified at Atwater’s trial disputed evidence provided by prosecutors, according to Vasconcellos. That includes a firearms instructor who said a pellet gun seized from Atwater could not have been the weapon used in the shootings and an expert who alleged police altered geolocation data on Atwater’s phone, Vasconcellos said.
Vasconcellos also alleged a judge — he didn’t specify if it was Judge Paul Ridgeway, who oversaw Atwater’s first trial, or Judge Gregory, who oversaw the second trial — biased the jury against Atwater by reprimanding him for yawning in court.
“This case is one of the greatest injustices in recent history,” Vasconcellos said. “An innocent man will die in prison for a crime he did not commit.”
Vasconcellos urged anyone with information in the shootings to contact him via email at dr.mark.naacp@gmail.com.
“Help this innocent man,” he said. “Otherwise, he will die in prison for a crime he could not have committed.”
Vasconcellos declined to answer questions after the news conference.
