back  and it hurt me a lot. It hurt me way more than we know to actually carry out that plan that plan.  He explained how he and three other inmates punched, stabbed, and hit the victims in the head with hammers, all to escape prison.  I wiped my hand off on my shirt because I cut my hand when I stabbed um Mr.

Smith. Brady’s mother, Tina Brady, started off by saying her husband and Michael’s father was quote a terrible guy.  He would lock us in rooms, hold us down.  Brady’s mom says Brady’s dad would physically, mentally, and sexually abuse the family for years, and she tried to leave him, but she couldn’t.  I was afraid of his father because he told me that if I ever took his kids, he would kill me.

 52 minutes. That’s all the time it took 12 people to decide that a man did not deserve to live. He sat still when he heard it. He had sat still through all of it. Through days of testimony, through evidence no one in that room wanted to look at twice through his own voice on a recording, calm, almost bored, admitting exactly what he had done and why he had done it.

 For people went to work that morning the way they had a thousand mornings before. They said goodbye the way people do when they don’t know it’s the last time. None of them came home. The man responsible for that didn’t act alone. And he didn’t act on impulse. What happened wasn’t rage and it wasn’t chaos.

 It was planned for 3 months down to the day of the week, the hour of the afternoon, and the exact weakness of the one person standing in the way. He told the men standing beside him that there were only two ways this could end. He was wrong. There was a third way out. It just took almost a decade for separate trials and one final guilty plea for the world to find out what it was.

 If you’re still here, you already know this isn’t a story we’re telling for entertainment. It’s four people who never made it home. The least we can do is remember them properly. Type where you’re watching this from right now so they know their story reached you. October the 12th, 2017. Pasquitank Correctional Institution, Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

 It was a Thursday, an ordinary one, at a medium security prison built to hold men the state considered dangerous, but manageable. Guards had done this shift a thousand times before. Inmates reported to work like they did every weekday. Nothing on paper suggested this day would be any different. By midafternoon, that assumption collapsed completely.

Inside the prison’s sewing plant, a work program where inmates produced textiles for state agencies, for men, set a fire. It wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t the goal. It was a diversion, the opening move, and an escape attempt that had been building for months, though almost no one inside those walls knew it yet.

In the confusion that followed, those four men moved through the facility carrying tools taken from their own workplace. In less than two hours, four people who worked there were dead or dying. Justin Smith, a correctional officer, was among them. Veronica Darden, who ran the sewing plant and had spent years training the very inmates now turning on her, was another.

 Wendy Shannon, a second correctional officer whose duties that day had nothing to do with the sewing plant at all, was caught in what came next. And Jeffrey How, a maintenance mechanic with no reason to be anywhere near what was happening, became the fourth. None of the four inmates made it past the prison’s outer fence.

 By early evening, officials confirmed the one thing that mattered most to the state. No one had escaped, but four families didn’t get that same relief. Two of the victims died that same afternoon. Two more held on for days, then weeks before their injuries took them as well. What happened at Pasquitank that Thursday would later be described by investigators as the deadliest escape attempt in North Carolina’s history.

 Not because anyone made it out, because of exactly how many people never made it home. To understand how this happened and how four men serving time for entirely separate crimes ended up working side by side in the very same building, we have to look at the system that put them there in the first place. The sewing plant at Pasquitank Correctional Institution ran on a single number that almost nobody outside the prison system ever thought to question.

 30 inmates, one correctional officer. That ratio wasn’t an emergency measure and it wasn’t a temporary staffing gap waiting to be fixed. It was the standard day in and day out inside a program run by Correction Enterprises, the state agency responsible for putting inmates to work manufacturing goods for government use. The sewing plant produced embroidered items and safety vests.

 And it did so with the help of men convicted of some of the most serious crimes in the state. Working alongside industrial equipment, scissors, hammers, metal shelving components, all of it simply part of the job. One of the inmates who worked there later described the staffing the same way.

 Every single time he was asked about it, there was always one officer. Sometimes another guard might stop by to talk for a few minutes, he said. But the plant floor itself never had more than a single person watching over 30 men at once. That account didn’t come from an outside critic of the system. It came from one of the four men who would go on to be convicted for what happened at Pasquitank, writing in his own words from behind bars.

 And it lines up almost exactly with what investigators would later confirm independently. The facility wasn’t blind to what happened inside its walls. Pasqua tank operated with roughly 186 cameras spread across the compound. A number officials would point to afterward as proof of oversight, but a camera only records. It cannot step between a weapon and the person standing in its path.

 It cannot call for backup faster than a radio can. What Pasquetank had was documentation, not prevention. The reasoning behind placing violent offenders into a work program built around tools wasn’t unique to this one prison. It came from a broader philosophy across the state’s correctional system. One built on a simple idea.

 Structured labor reduces idle time. And idle time is what breeds trouble behind bars. Give inmates something productive to do. The thinking went and the risk of conflict goes down. What that philosophy never accounted for was concentration. Four men, each already serving time for acts of extreme violence, ended up assigned to that exact same work program inside that exact same building, supervised by that exact same loan officer day after day for months on end.

 None of it was hidden. It wasn’t a secret protocol or an oversight buried somewhere in paperwork no one read. It was simply how the sewing plant had always operated, accepted as routine by staff and inmates alike. Right up until the afternoon, it stopped being routine at all. To understand what happened next, we have to meet the four men who spent those months working inside that plant and understand exactly how each of them ended up there in the first place.

Mikuel Edward Brady II was born in Vermont and by the time he reached adulthood, his name was already familiar to law enforcement across the state. He grew up in a household marked by instability and abuse. The kind of early environment that shapes a pattern long before anyone outside the family ever notices it.

 As a teenager, that pattern began to escalate. In 2008, Brady was connected to the theft of more than 200 sticks of dynamite from a quarry in Bethl, Vermont. A crime serious enough to draw federal attention almost immediately. The following year, he was tied to a home invasion in South Royaltton. The victim, a woman named Janet Babcock, suffered a severe brain injury as a result, one that left lasting effects on the rest of her life.

It was one of the clearest signs yet that Brady’s behavior wasn’t slowing down. It was accelerating and quickly. Rather than face what was building against him, Brady ran. along with an associate named Joshua Hill. He crossed into Mexico, staying out of reach of Vermont authorities for a period of time before the two were eventually located, captured, and extradited back to the United States.

 Brady served time for those charges, and for a while, it looked like he might have turned a corner. He was released on furlow, a conditional form of release granted for good behavior. That stability didn’t last. Brady violated the terms of his release and fled Vermont entirely, settling in North Carolina, trying to build a life under the radar.

 That attempt ended on the side of a highway in Durham. In February of 2013, North Carolina State Highway Patrol trooper Michael Pototts pulled Brady over for a routine traffic violation. Knowing that identification meant a return to custody, Brady made a decision that would define the rest of his life. He shot Trooper Pots.

 multiple times before fleeing the scene. Pot survived, but the shooting placed Brady squarely inside the North Carolina prison system where he would eventually be sent to serve his sentence at Pasquitank Correctional Institution. At the time, Brady’s girlfriend, Lindseay Smith, who was pregnant, was also taken into custody and separately charged as an accessory.

A reminder that the consequences of what Brady said in motion were never contained to himself alone. Wasiza Daton Buckman came from an entirely different background, though his path would eventually cross Brady’s inside the same facility. Buckman was originally from the Elizabeth City area, the same region where Pasquitank Correctional Institution stands.

 In 2014, he was connected to the killing of a man named Deront Davis. The case ended in a plea agreement and Buckman was convicted of seconddegree murder rather than facing the original charge. That conviction is what brought him into the North Carolina prison system and eventually into the very same sewing plant where Brady was already assigned to work.

 Jonathan Monk’s story took a different shape entirely. Before Pasquitank, Monk served in the United States military, where he formed a close friendship with a fellow service member named Justin Dri. That friendship and Monk’s closeness to DRI’s family ended in violence in 2011 when Monk attacked DRI’s wife Tabitha.

 The attack led to a conviction for attempted first-degree murder. And that conviction is what eventually placed Monk inside Pasquitank alongside Brady and Buckman. The fourth man was Seth Jameson Frasier and his road there was in some ways the simplest of the four to trace. Frasier had been convicted on a first-degree burglary charge and was serving a sentence somewhere between 84 and 110 months at the time these events took place.

 That sentence on its own is the entire reason Frasier was inside Pasquitank Correctional Institution. He had no prior connection to Brady Buckman or Monk. He was simply another inmate serving out his own separate sentence in the same building during the same stretch of time. for men, for entirely different roads leading to the same address.

 A planner with a long documented history of escalating violence and a pattern of running from consequences. An enforcer already serving time for taking a life. A recruit whose closest personal relationship ended in a conviction for attempted murder. And a fourth man whose only real link to the other three was a work assignment that happened to place him in the same room at the same time.

None of these four arrived at Pasquitank with any sign that they would one day be tied together in what investigators would later call the deadliest escape attempt in the state’s history. Their crimes were unrelated. Their victims had nothing in common. Their sentences came from different counties, different courtrooms, different years of their lives entirely.

 What brought them together wasn’t fate. It wasn’t the kind of dramatic coincidence true crime stories sometimes lean on. It was something far more ordinary and in its own way far more troubling. A prison work assignment built on a staffing structure that placed all four of them in the same room, doing the same job, watched over by the very same single officer for months at a time.

 It was inside that room, surrounded by the tools of an ordinary manufacturing job, that four separate criminal histories began to intersect. And it was there quietly that a plan began taking shape. one that would take three full months to come together before anyone put it into motion.

 By the time Brady had spent even a few weeks working inside the sewing plant, he had already started doing something none of the staff around him seemed to notice. He was watching, not in a way that raised any suspicion. Inmates were expected to observe their surroundings, to learn a routine, to understand where the exits were and how a shift changed hands.

 What set Brady apart was how long he kept watching and exactly how carefully. Over the course of roughly 3 months, Brady studied the rhythm of the sewing plant, the way someone studies a schedule they intend to use against the very people who built it. He noted which officers worked, which days, and how those patterns shifted depending on the day of the week.

 One detail stood out above everything else. On Thursdays, the loading dock, a critical point of access between the interior of the building and the outside world, tended to be less closely watched than on any other day. He studied the people just as closely as he studied the schedule. Justin Smith, the correctional officer typically assigned to oversee the sewing plant floor, became a specific point of focus.

Brady later described in his own words exactly why Smith mattered to the plan. He believed Smith was not someone who would communicate quickly or effectively if something went wrong, meaning any call for help through Smith’s radio would likely come too late to matter. In a plan built entirely around minutes, that delay was the exact advantage the group was counting on.

 While Brady studied people, all four men were quietly preparing equipment of their own. Using materials already available inside the plant, they began putting together backpacks meant to carry supplies for life outside the facility. Clothing, food, anything that might help four men disappear once they were beyond the fence line.

 None of it required smuggling anything in from outside. Every material used came from inside the very room where they worked every single day, hiding in plain sight among ordinary production supplies. Alongside the backpacks, the group also began setting aside items from their own workstations, ones that could serve a purpose far beyond their intended use.

Tools that were part of daily sewing plant operations, ones inmates handled constantly without a second glance from staff were quietly repurposed over time. What made this phase of the plan so effective wasn’t secrecy in the traditional sense. It was that everything happened out in the open inside a room already filled with fabric tools and constant movement to a guard walking through on a routine check.

 Four men working with their hands looked exactly like four men doing their jobs. There was nothing to flag because nothing about it looked out of place. The plan was originally set for a date roughly 2 weeks later than when it actually happened. But Brady began to suspect that word of what they were preparing had reached at least one other inmate, someone who might report it to staff before the group was ready to act.

Rather than risk the entire plan being exposed before it could even begin, Brady made the decision to move the timeline forward. That single decision meant everything the four men had spent three months building toward would now come down to one Thursday afternoon, arriving sooner than any of them had originally planned, and with far less room left for anything to go wrong.

 It began at 3:00 in the afternoon on Thursday, October the 12th. Brady set a fire inside the sewing plant stock room using material he had been quietly collecting for days beforehand. It wasn’t meant to destroy anything. It was meant to pull attention away from what was about to happen next, and it worked exactly as planned.

 Smoke triggered the facility’s alarm system within moments, and officers throughout the building began moving toward the fire, drawn by the one thing every prison is trained to respond to immediately. While that response was still forming, the four men made their move. Veronica Darden was the first to encounter them near a freight elevator not far from the plant she had overseen for years.

 What happened to her in that hallway left her fatally injured. Her keys and her radio were taken in the moments that followed. Both items the group needed for what came next. Justin Smith was found soon after, led away from open view inside the sewing plant itself. He did not survive the encounter. His radio, the same radio Brady had studied and planned around for months, was taken as well.

 With two radios now in their possession, the group used one of them to place a false report, directing responding staff toward a completely different part of the prison. It was a second diversion layered on top of the first, and it worked. Attention that should have been converging on the sewing plant was instead pulled further away from it.

What happened next has often been described as a single unified escape by four men moving as one group. Court testimony later established that this wasn’t accurate. The four men split into two. Brady and Jonathan Monk made their way toward the loading dock, the same access point Brady had identified months earlier as the facilities weakest point on a Thursday afternoon.

 Wasa Buckman and Seth Frasier followed a different path, moving separately with a cart loaded with tools and supplies gathered from the sewing plant. Material meant to support the group once they reached the outside. At the loading dock, Brady and Monk encountered Wendy Shannon, a correctional officer whose duties that day had nothing to do with the sewing plant at all, and Jeffrey How, a maintenance mechanic who happened to be nearby when the chaos reached that part of the building.

 Both were seriously injured in the encounter that followed. Neither would recover. Also present on the loading dock that afternoon was George [ __ ] the prison’s canteen officer, who found himself caught in the same location as the group made their way toward the exterior of the building. [ __ ] was attacked as well, sustaining serious injuries of his own.

 Unlike Shannon and Howal, [ __ ] survived. By this point, the diversion fire had done more than distract staff. It had triggered a full lockdown of the facility, setting off alarms across the compound and pulling in additional officers from every direction. Word of the incident spread quickly enough that nearby schools were placed on lockdown as a precaution.

 Unsure at first exactly what was unfolding just beyond their fence lines. As the four men pushed toward the prison yard and began attempting to climb the perimeter fence, correctional officer Scott Stormer was among the first responders to reach that part of the compound. Armed with only pepper spray and a batten, standard equipment for guards inside the facility who do not carry firearms, Stormer moved to stop them.

 In the struggle that followed, Stormer was injured as well, though he continued regardless, working to subdue Jonathan Monk, who at that point had turned to confront him directly. Stormer used his pepper spray and his batten to bring Monk down, and despite his own injuries, he stayed on his feet long enough to see the situation through.

 He would later be treated at a hospital and released, having survived an encounter that could easily have ended very differently. Buckman, attempting to scale a section of fence topped with razor wire, became caught in it, left hanging as he tried to free himself. Stormer used his pepper spray on Buckman as well, and Buckman eventually fell free, only to be caught and restrained by additional officers who had by then arrived at the scene.

Frasier was captured in a similar fashion, unable to clear the fence line before officers reached him. Brady made it further than the others. He managed to get over the first fence entirely, coming within reach of the outer barrier before officers with firearms arrived and called for him to surrender.

 He did without further incident at the base of that final fence. By approximately 5:00 that evening, less than two hours after the fire was first set, officials confirmed what mattered most from a security standpoint. All inmates were accounted for. None had escaped the facility. But that confirmation offered no comfort to the people whose lives had already been changed forever inside those walls.

 Veronica Darden and Justin Smith were gone. Wendy Shannon and Jeffrey How were fighting for their lives, injuries that would ultimately prove fatal in the weeks that followed. George [ __ ] and Scott Stormer had survived, but not without cost. Both of them carrying the physical and emotional weight of that afternoon for years afterward.

 In under two hours, an escape plan 3 months in the making had collapsed entirely. Every man involved was back in custody before the sun went down. And yet for the people whose job it had been to keep those men contained in the first place, that outcome offered no version of relief. What remained was the aftermath, the families who had to be told, the community that had to make sense of what happened inside a building most of them had never thought twice about.

 And a state correctional system that would spend years trying to understand exactly how something like this had ever been allowed to happen in the first place. By the time the sun went down on October the 12th, Pasquitank Correctional Institution was no longer just a state prison in eastern North Carolina. It had become the site of what officials would soon describe as the deadliest escape attempt in the state’s history.

 The full scope of who had been affected extended well beyond the four names already lost or still fighting for their lives. Curtis Casper, a correctional officer working alongside George [ __ ] that day, was also injured during the encounter. And it was Casper who played a direct role in helping [ __ ] survive the ordeal.

 Casper would later speak publicly about that day, at times accompanied by a service dog that had become part of his own recovery in the years that followed. Three additional employees, Steve Sanders, Jerry Byum, and Timothy Lewis, were also named among those injured during the attack. their experiences becoming part of the official record, even though their names rarely made it into early coverage of the case.

 In total, more than a dozen people connected to the facility, staff, and inmates alike, sustained injuries that day, a number that reflected just how far the violence had reached beyond its original targets. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper responded within hours, issuing a statement acknowledging the loss and ordering an immediate suspension of the inmate work program that had placed those four men together inside the sewing plant in the first place.

 It was an acknowledgment, even if never stated outright, that the structure surrounding that program had failed in a way the state could no longer afford to ignore. North Carolina Department of Public Safety Secretary Eric Hooks echoed that sentiment publicly, expressing condolences on behalf of the entire department and describing the loss as one that would be felt throughout the correctional system as a whole, not just within the walls of a single facility.

In the days that followed, Ruben Young, serving at the time as the department’s interim chief deputy secretary, issued additional statements as investigators worked to piece together the full sequence of events. His involvement reflected just how far up the chain of command this incident had traveled. Inside an institution unaccustomed to this level of scrutiny from outside its own walls.

 For the community surrounding Elizabeth City, the aftermath extended into everyday life in ways few had anticipated. Schools near the facility had already gone into lockdown during the incident itself. And in the weeks that followed, questions about safety, staffing, and oversight became part of ongoing conversation far beyond the prison’s immediate perimeter.

Investigators from the State Bureau of Investigation, working alongside the Pasquitank County Sheriff’s Office, spent months building a case that would eventually span years of legal proceedings. The physical evidence recovered, along with surveillance footage and accounts from those who survived, would later form the backbone of four separate trials, each one requiring its own careful reconstruction of a single unpredictable afternoon.

 5 years later, in October of 2022, Pasquitank Correctional Institution marked the anniversary of that day in a quiet, deliberate way. staff released balloons into the sky at the exact hour the fire had first been set, followed by a moment of silence observed across the entire facility. Warden Daniel Ever spoke to staff that day, acknowledging that for many of the people who had lived through the events of October 12th, the passage of time had not resolved what they carried with them.

Some, he said, were still working through what that afternoon had cost them personally years after their physical injuries had already healed. The institutional response to that day never fully closed. It shifted instead from emergency management in the hours immediately following the attack to a longer reckoning that stretched across years of internal review, policy change, and quiet remembrance inside a facility that would never again operate quite the way it had before October the 12th.

 What remained unresolved even after the immediate response had run its course was the question of accountability. That question would not be answered inside the walls of Pasquitank at all. It would be answered slowly and separately inside four different courtrooms. Nearly two years passed between the day the fire was set and the day the first of the four men stood before a jury.

 Muel Brady’s case moved first and even before it reached the murder trial, Brady faced a separate reckoning tied to something that happened years earlier back when he first arrived in North Carolina. His shooting of trooper Michael Pototts in 2013 carried its own federal charge handled entirely apart from the events at Pasquitank.

 That case was presided over by Judge William L. Ostein Jr. who sentenced Brady on federal firearms charges tied to that earlier shooting. It closed one chapter of Brady’s criminal history, even as an entirely separate and far larger one was just beginning to take shape in the courts. The murder trial itself was moved out of Pasquitank County, relocated instead to Dare County due to the volume of local attention the case had already drawn.

District Attorney Andrew Wamble led the prosecution, working to lay out for the jury not just what had happened on October the 12th, but the months of planning that preceded it. Assistant District Attorney Kim Palini played a central role in presenting that evidence, walking jurors through surveillance footage, witness testimony, and the physical evidence recovered from the scene.

 What made Brady’s trial especially notable was Brady himself. Rather than remaining silent, as many defendants in capital cases choose to do, Brady took the stand and spoke for hours, describing the plan from its earliest stages through to its final collapse at the fence line. He answered questions directly without denying his role in what had happened.

 It was a rare choice and one that left the jury with Brady’s own account of events delivered in his own words rather than reconstructed entirely through the accounts of others. The jury found Brady guilty on all counts connected to the murders. During the sentencing phase that followed, they returned a unanimous recommendation of death.

 A decision reached after deliberation that by court standards moved remarkably fast. Brady became the first of the four men to receive a death sentence. In 2019, 2 years after the events that brought him there was Buckman’s case did not move nearly as quickly. Delays pushed his trial back repeatedly, extending the weight by years beyond what anyone initially expected.

 When the trial finally proceeded, it took place in the same Dare County courtroom that had handled Brady’s case. Assistant District Attorney Alexis Massingill took a leading role in presenting the state’s evidence against Buckman, building much of the case around the same body of surveillance footage and testimony already used once before, now applied specifically to Buckman’s individual actions that day.

 Buckman’s trial produced a result unlike Brady’s. The jury convicted him on all four counts of murder, but when it came to sentencing, the outcome split. For three of the four victims, the jury recommended death. For the fourth, Veronica Darden, the jury instead recommended life without the possibility of parole.

 Under North Carolina law, juries weigh aggravating and mitigating factors separately for each individual victim, which meant it was entirely possible, and in this case, exactly what happened, for one defendant to receive different sentences tied to different lives lost on the very same afternoon.

 Buckman’s sentencing came down in 2023, more than 6 years after the crime itself. Jonathan Monk’s trial was different in another way entirely. Unlike Brady and Buckman whose cases had been relocated to Dare County, Monk’s trial remained in Pasquitank County itself, held before Pit County senior resident Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Foster.

 The prosecution team included assistant district attorneys Kim Palini and Alexis Massing. Once again joined this time by legal assistant Hannah Gilroy, whose work behind the scenes helped manage a case built on years of accumulated evidence and testimony from Brady and Buckman’s earlier proceedings. The jury and Monk’s case reached its own unanimous conclusion.

 Guilty on all counts, followed by a recommendation of death on each of the four murder charges. Judge Foster accepted that recommendation, formally sentencing Monk to death in the spring of 2025. nearly 8 years after the crime that led him there. By the time Monk’s case concluded, three of the four men involved in the escape attempt had received death sentences.

 A combined total of 11 separate death sentences handed down across three separate trials. That left only Seth Frasier, whose case had not yet gone before a jury at all. Rather than proceed to a fourth trial, Frasier’s case was resolved differently. He entered a guilty plea, admitting to all four counts of murder along with the related charges connected to the escape attempt itself.

 That decision came after prosecutors and the victim’s families discussed how best to move forward. Weighing the toll a fourth trial would take against the certainty a plea could guarantee without further delay. Judge Foster, who had already presided over Monk’s trial, also oversaw Frasier’s sentencing. Rather than a jury recommendation, this sentence came directly from the court.

 Frasier received four consecutive sentences of life without the possibility of parole, one for each life lost on October the 12th, along with additional sentencing tied to the remaining charges connected to the escape itself. His case concluded in the fall of 2025, closing out the legal proceedings tied to the events at Pasquitank almost exactly 8 years after they began.

 Today, both Mikuel Brady and Wiza Buckman are held at ADX Florence in Colorado, a federal facility reserved for the highest security inmates in the country. Their presence there isn’t a matter of federal conviction alone. It reflects a decision made by North Carolina officials to move both men out of the state’s own death row entirely.

 A step taken to reduce the risk either could pose to staff or other inmates while their sentences remain unresolved. Jonathan Monk remains in North Carolina state custody, one of more than a 100 people currently sitting on the state’s death row. Seth Frasier, having pleaded guilty rather than face trial, is serving his sentence in the general prison population without the added security classification that comes with a death sentence.

 For three of these four men, however, a death sentence in North Carolina carries a very different weight than it might elsewhere in the country. The state has not carried out an execution since 2006, a period stretching close to two decades. Legal challenges, disputes over lethal injection procedures, and questions surrounding the fairness of past sentencing have kept executions on hold, even as the number of people sentenced to death in North Carolina has continued to grow year after year, with no corresponding movement toward carrying

any of those sentences out. That means Brady, Buckman, and Monk’s death sentences currently exist without any scheduled date attached to them at all. A legal status that has remained unchanged for years across the state’s death row as a whole. That may not remain true for much longer. New legislation passed in North Carolina has introduced accelerated deadlines for reviewing older death penalty cases, requiring many of them to move through appeals on a defined timeline for the first time in nearly 20 years. Under

that legislation, cases like these are expected to be scheduled for review by the end of 2026, with hearings required to take place no later than the end of 2027. Four families who have already waited years through four separate trials and one guilty plea. This development represents something they haven’t had since October of 2017.

 A defined timeline moving forward instead of an open-ended wait with no end in sight. What happens next remains uncertain. Appeals in capital cases can stretch on for years, even under an accelerated schedule. And nothing about this new legislation guarantees an execution will ultimately take place. What it does guarantee is that for the first time since these sentences were handed down, the question of whether North Carolina will ever actually carry them out is no longer sitting entirely still.

 For people went to work on an ordinary Thursday expecting to come home. Eight years, four trials, and one guilty plea later, the world finally has the full account of why they didn’t. That’s the kind of case this channel exists to follow. Not just the crime, and not just the verdict, but everything that comes after.

 The appeals, the delays, the years where a sentence sits on paper without anyone knowing whether it will ever actually be carried out. Most channels stop the moment sentencing ends. We don’t. If you want to know what happens to Brady, Buckman, and Monk now that North Carolina’s new appeals timeline is finally moving, subscribing is the only way to see that story continue the moment it does.

 Before you go, we want to know something. With cases like this one now required to move through appeals on an actual deadline for the first time in nearly 20 years, do you think these sentences will finally be carried out, or will they sit exactly where they’ve sat for the past two decades? Type your answer below and tell us why.

 And if you’re watching this from somewhere far from Elizabeth City, North Carolina, let us know exactly where. For people never made it home from work that day, the least this channel can do is make sure their story reaches every corner it possibly can. One viewer, one comment, one place on the map at a