A Durham woman who spent more than a year in jail on a murder charge is now on house arrest after prosecutors quietly dropped the case earlier this month, and the victim's mother says nobody from the District Attorney's office ever told her it happened. Patricia Ayers, 33, was accused of fatally strangling 41-year-old Mikel Johnson following a December 2024 incident at her home, but Mary Patterson-Johnson, Johnson's mother, says she found out the murder charge was gone only after being contacted by a reporter.
According to the News & Observer, Assistant District Attorney Maryam Al-Zoubi filed the notice of dismissal in Durham County on September 4, and the dismissal form itself contained a blank explanation section. Patterson-Johnson told the paper that no one notified her of the decision, and that learning about it secondhand felt like a betrayal of the justice system she had trusted to see the case through.
Johnson died after being taken off life support following the December 2024 incident, which occurred after he went to Ayers' home on December 7, 2024, for a birthday celebration, per the same account. Ayers was initially charged with felony assault by strangulation before prosecutors upgraded the charge to murder once Johnson died. Charging documents described Ayers as Johnson's girlfriend, though Patterson-Johnson disputed that characterization, according to the newspaper's reporting.
A Case That Started Unraveling in February
The murder case began falling apart months before it was formally dismissed. At a February 4 hearing, Superior Court Judge Shamieka Rhinehart reduced Ayers' bail to $2,000, and Assistant District Attorney Mike Wallace told the court he did not have enough evidence of Ayers' guilt at that point, saying, “I have a duty to look at this fully.” Wallace had signed Ayers' indictment despite his doubts, the News & Observer reports, and Ayers has been out on house arrest since that February hearing.
Durham County Public Defender's Office lawyers, led by Chief Public Defender Dawn Baxton, discovered holes in the narrative presented by Durham police, according to the outlet's reporting. Baxton said that Johnson and a 911 caller could be heard on the recording addressing someone else as the person strangling Johnson. That caller, identified in the reporting only as a minor relative of Ayers, provided another person's identifying details as the offender, but the child's mother refused to let the caller speak further with police.
An Unnamed Relative With a Troubled Past
The person named by the 911 caller was Ayers' aunt-in-law, who the News & Observer chose not to name and who has not been charged with any crime. The paper reported that this relative was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army, assaulted several officers in 2023, and had a history of strangulation. None of those details resulted in charges against her in Johnson's death, and the case remains open in the sense that Ayers' murder charge could theoretically be refiled.
Under North Carolina law, a voluntary dismissal like the one filed against Ayers does not grant permanent immunity from prosecution. Felony offenses in the state carry no statute of limitations, and prosecutors retain the authority to re-indict if new evidence surfaces, according to guidance from the UNC School of Government. For now, though, Ayers' case has been reassigned to the Durham County Public Defender's Office, and Wallace declined to comment further when reached by the newspaper.
Statutory Notification Rules and an Unanswered Call
North Carolina law imposes specific obligations on prosecutors when it comes to keeping victims' families informed. Under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-832(f), prosecutors are required to offer a crime victim or next-of-kin the chance to confer with a DA's office attorney before dismissing charges, entering plea negotiations, or offering pretrial diversion, according to a victims' rights guide compiled by Lewis & Clark Law School. A separate statute, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-834, requires district attorney offices to notify a victim or next-of-kin in writing of a case's final disposition within 30 days of the last trial court proceeding.
Those obligations were reinforced when North Carolina voters approved the Marsy's Law constitutional amendment in November 2018, which expanded Article I, Section 37 of the state constitution to guarantee crime victims and surviving family enforceable rights to confer with prosecutors and receive timely court notifications, according to Ballotpedia. A Durham Police Department investigator had previously told Patterson-Johnson that prosecutors were preparing the case for a grand jury indictment, according to the News & Observer's reporting, which makes the eventual silence around the dismissal more jarring for the family. Patterson-Johnson said letting Ayers out was, in her words, a slap in the face with no justice, and she said she believes Ayers is responsible for her son's death.
Prosecutors Stay Quiet as Scrutiny Builds
Neither Baxton nor Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry had responded to the News & Observer's requests for comment as of Tuesday. Deberry took office in 2019 after campaigning on a platform of bail reform, racial equity, and holding cases to strict evidentiary standards before trial, according to background reporting from The Marshall Project. Baxton, who leads Durham's Defender District 14, took over an office recognized as the first public defender agency in North Carolina to integrate dedicated social workers into defense teams.
This is not the first time Deberry's office has faced questions over how it handles case dismissals. Hoodline reported in March that a wrongful-death lawsuit followed a dismissal in a separate 2021 homicide, after a judge dropped murder charges in that case due to missed prosecutorial deadlines. The North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence had recorded Johnson's death as part of its statewide tracking of fatal domestic violence incidents in 2024.
Patterson-Johnson remembers her son as the eldest of three siblings who built a life around family and green spaces. He was a certified horticulturist and tattoo artist who once owned a landscaping company in Chapel Hill with his grandfather, and he was a father of 11 children — six biological and more than 10 adoptive siblings welcomed into the family, according to the News & Observer's account of his life. For now, Ayers remains on house arrest while the case sits with the public defender's office, and Johnson's mother is left waiting for answers about what happens next.
