Andrew Kerr of the Washington Free Beacon pans a recent response to questions from North Carolina’s leading Democratic candidate for US Senate.
As crime emerges at a flashpoint in the race for North Carolina’s vacant Senate seat, leading Democrat Roy Cooper, who served as the state’s governor from 2017 through 2025, doesn’t want to talk about the uptick of seemingly random stabbings on the Charlotte light rail by violent repeat criminals. Cooper refused to comment on the latest attack, which was committed by a twice-deported illegal immigrant from Honduras with a lengthy criminal rap sheet, with his campaign instead sending the Washington Free Beacon an unrelated statement attacking his Republican opponent as a “Big Oil lobbyist.”
The illegal immigrant, Oscar Gerardo Solorzano-Garcia, boarded the Charlotte light rail on Dec. 5, consumed a large quantity of an alcoholic drink known as Beatbox, and began yelling indiscriminately before he stabbed another passenger in the chest with an “extremely large fixed-blade knife,” according to documents charging him with attempted first-degree murder. Days later, the FBI revealed Solorzano-Garcia should have never been in the United States after having been convicted of robbery in 2012, arrested for aggravated battery with a deadly weapon in 2016, deported from the country in 2018, and deported again in 2021 after being convicted of illegal reentry.
But the Cooper campaign did not address the incident when asked to comment on the latest Charlotte light rail stabbing, with a spokesperson instead providing a boilerplate statement attacking former RNC chairman Michael Whatley that the campaign has previously supplied verbatim twice to the Free Beacon and to several other news outlets dating back to September.
“Roy Cooper is the only candidate who spent his career prosecuting violent criminals and keeping thousands of them behind bars as attorney general, and signing tough on crime laws and stricter bail and pretrial release rules as governor,” a Cooper campaign spokesperson told the Free Beacon. “DC insider and Big Oil lobbyist Michael Whatley is desperate to distract from his support for cuts to law enforcement that make North Carolinians less safe.”
