Bizarre details have emerged about the man arrested after a deadly shooting at a waterfront restaurant in Southport, North Carolina, over the weekend, an incident that claimed the lives of three people, with at least five others wounded.
In what authorities have described as a “highly premeditated” attack, former Marine Nigel Edge opened fire into the American Fish Company from a boat on the Cape Fear River at about 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night before speeding off for the Intracoastal Waterway in the direction of Oak Island.
(Video Credit: FOX8 WGHP)
He was later apprehended by the Coast Guard at an Oak Island pubic boat ramp and turned over to Southport police. And while the motive for the massacre remains unclear, media outlets are putting together a peculiar picture of the alleged shooter’s past, including a tie to country music singer Kellie Pickler.
Edge, who changed his name from Sean DeBevoise in 2023, accompanied the “American Idol” star to the 2012 CMT Music Awards at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tennessee, according to the New York Post which published a picture of the accused killer with his date Pickler on the red carpet, dressed in his USMC uniform along with Rusty, his service dog.
The singer posted a picture of herself with the wounded Iraq War vet on Twitter, which has since rebranded as X, at the time. “Me and my date (Sgt Sean Debevoise)….,” she wrote.
Me and my date (Sgt Sean Debevoise)…. #CMTawards pic.twitter.com/ckheQJwE
— kellie pickler (@kelliepickler) June 7, 2012
“I am ecstatic about being here at the CMT Music Awards with Kellie,” DeBevoise said, according to a 2012 Taste of Country article, “even more to consider her a friend. She is the most sincere person I know. She is an angel.”
Pickler met the former Marine at a charity event in North Carolina, according to Taste of Country, which cited a press release saying that DeBevoise “invited her to the Hope For Our Heroes, Got Heart, Give Hope Gala. Pickler had to decline — as she was flying out for her fifth USO tour — but invited him to the CMT Music Awards instead. She’s always been a staunch supporter of the troops, because in her words, ‘It takes a very special person to sacrifice everything.'”
“When I say ‘everything,’ I don’t mean just their time, I mean their life. Everything!” she added. “Their family, their kids, their loved ones. You sacrifice everything to put your life on the line for us, and it’s such a great, honorable, heroic thing … We have to raise our glass to them and keep them all in our prayers and always say thank you.”
But the relationship would eventually take a darker turn with him suing the singer whom he accused of trying to kill him with a poison-laced glass of Jim Beam whiskey at the event, according to TMZ, which obtained court documents.
“In various lawsuits and a book he wrote about his combat history, Edge claimed he was the victim of friendly fire in a plot orchestrated by ‘LGBTQ White Supremacists’ who wanted him dead for being a straight man,” the New York Post reported.
According to a report from the News & Observer, Edge “was severely wounded while serving in Iraq, struggled with mental illness for decades and carried a bullet in his brain years past his time in war.”
In 2020, he published “Headshot: Betrayal of a Nation,” in which the combat veteran describes joining the military in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the injuries that he suffered during an attack in Anbar Province.
“Although other explosions occurred,” he wrote in the self-published book, “the one that hit me crashed into my helmet, causing a traumatic brain injury and paralyzing half my body. … This wasn’t the end of my story. It was only the beginning.”
The 39-year-old Purple Heart recipient who did two tours of duty in Iraq is due in court on Monday.
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