Lawyers joins family of man killed in suspicious car crash for Raleigh news conference
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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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Prominent civil rights lawyers Ben Crump and Bakari Sellers joined the family of Tyrone Mason on Friday morning in downtown Raleigh for a news conference.
Tyrone was killed in a suspicious car crash on Capital Boulevard back in October. His family is looking for answers after the actions of state troopers investigating that night have been called into question.
“I never thought my baby would leave this world before me,” Henrietta Mason, Tyrone’s mother, said during the conference. “I love my baby. My baby leaves behind five kids, one in heaven with him.”
Following the 2024 crash, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman discovered that Trooper Garrett Macario, who investigated the incident, gave false and misleading information to Raleigh police.
She told ABC11 in January that she had no choice but to dismiss the case because of doubts about Macario’s reliability and credibility as a witness.
“It’s incredibly frustrating. We trust our law enforcement to tell the truth. And when we have reason to believe they aren’t, it’s disgusting, frankly. It’s frustrating,” Freeman said in January.
Both Trooper Macario and his supervisor Matthew Morrison are on administrative leave while the patrol and State Bureau of Investigation look into the matter.
The case has already led to the dismissal of nearly 200 cases where Macario was a key witness, which were mostly DWI cases.
“They would not have dismissed those cases if there were not something on that video — that dash cam, and from the body cam — that was just god awful,” Crump said during the news conference.
ABC11 reached out to Freeman Friday to see if any charges might be filed against Macario. She said the investigation is ongoing.
ABC11 is The News & Observer’s newsgathering partner.
This story was originally published March 14, 2025 at 8:17 AM.
