NC Neo-Nazi Arrested in Murder of Former Supervisor

Kenneth Stancil

The shotgun killing of a print shop supervisor at Wayne Community College yesterday in Goldsboro, N.C., is now being investigated as a hate crime, with a 20-year-old neo-Nazi in custody in Florida.

Kenneth Morgan Stancil III, of Goldsboro, was arrested early Tuesday while sleeping on the ocean beach in Daytona, Fla. – 540 miles from the community college print shop where Ron Lane was fatally shot as he arrived for work, authorities said.

Goldsboro police said today they are investigating the homicide as a hate crime, but are not publicly discussing a specific motive.

Police Sgt. Jeremy Sutton told reporters that the suspect had a calculated plan that he carried out with one blast from a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun before fleeing the Wayne County college campus on a motorcycle. The motorcycle was later found abandoned on Interstate 95 near Lumberton, N.C.

Brent Hood, who was the supervisor of the shooting victim, said Lane was gay, Greensboro, N.C.,television station WITN reported.

The suspect has the number “88” — signifying “Heil Hitler” because the eighth letter of the alphabet is H — tattooed on his cheek. He also has a German Iron Cross tattoo on his neck, which can be a neo-Nazi signifier as well.

Police say they believe Stancil’s “88” facial tattoo was done as recently as last weekend — perhaps a symbolic act as he contemplated taking the life of another person in furtherance of his white supremacist beliefs.

Sutton, of the Goldsboro police department, said investigators are aware of the tattoo and its connection to white supremacy.

Lane had been employed in the college print shop for more than 16 years, and the suspect previously was a work-study student there.

Dr. Kay Albertson, the president of Wayne Community College, told media outlets that Stancil was fired from his work-study job on March 3 for “poor attendance.”

It’s not clear at this point how the suspect got from Lumberton, where he abandoned his motorcycle, to Daytona Beach, where Volusia County Beach Patrol found him sleeping on a beach around 1:20 a.m. this morning with a knife in his possession. They took him into custody for further investigation.