A woman was pulled into a van south of Raeford, punched in the eye, cut with a knife and then pushed out onto the roadside near a cemetery, according to the Hoke County Sheriff's Office. Deputies found her lying in the grass near an intersection along Oakdale Gin Road close to Highland Biblical Gardens Cemetery, and she was taken to a hospital with what investigators described as minor injuries. Two men remain unaccounted for, and the sheriff's office says it believes the attack was an isolated incident.
The account comes from a news release the Hoke County Sheriff's Office issued Monday, as first reported by The Charlotte Observer. According to that reporting, the woman was grabbed and forced into a blue or black van driven by one man while an unknown second male attacked her inside the vehicle, striking her in the eye and cutting her with a knife before she was shoved out onto the road. She later met with detectives to describe what happened. Raeford sits roughly 90 miles southwest of downtown Raleigh, per the same report.
Investigators say the attack happened Saturday south of Raeford, and the sheriff's office has stated there is no immediate threat to the public. Beyond the van's dark color and the presence of two men, no suspect descriptions or additional vehicle details have been released. The sheriff's office has not disclosed a motive for the attack.
A Rural County Still Grappling With Violent Crime
Hoke County is a largely rural jurisdiction of roughly 56,900 residents as of 2025, with Raeford serving as its county seat and commercial center, according to USAFacts. A 2025 profile from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety found the county recorded 240 total violent crimes in 2023, with aggravated assault making up 90.8% of those offenses. Separately, statistics published by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation show the Hoke County Sheriff's Office investigated 1,140 total criminal offenses in 2024, including 11 aggravated assaults and 268 burglaries.
The department is led by Sheriff Roderick Virgil, a lifelong Hoke County resident and former EMT and firefighter, according to the Hoke County Sheriff's Office. Anyone with information on the case can call the office's confidential tip hotline at (910) 878-1100 or its main line at (910) 875-5111.
Not the First Violent Weekend for the Area
This is not the first time in recent months that Hoke County deputies have responded to violent incidents in and around Raeford. Hoodline previously reported that deputies investigated a violent weekend in Raeford in June 2026, after discovering two people dead during a welfare check on Quigley Court and responding separately to a shooting on Laurinburg Road.
The case also echoes a recent incident in neighboring Harnett County, where law enforcement arrested a 38-year-old man on first-degree kidnapping charges in August after a 12-year-old girl escaped a forced abduction in a vehicle along U.S. Highway 421, as Hoodline reported at the time. If suspects in the Hoke County case are eventually apprehended, the severity of any charges would likely hinge on North Carolina's kidnapping statute. Under North Carolina General Statute § 14-39, kidnapping is classified as second-degree — a Class E felony punishable by up to 88 months in prison — if a victim is released in a safe place without serious injury, but the charge escalates to first-degree kidnapping, a Class C felony, if the victim suffers serious bodily harm, is sexually assaulted, or is not released safely, according to legal analysis published by Carolina Attorneys.
Should arrests be made, initial bail conditions for a charge tied to a violent felony or abduction would have to be set by a district court judge rather than a magistrate, per North Carolina General Statute § 15A-534.1, as detailed by Ryan Willis Law. Hoke County also has no Level 1 trauma centers within its boundaries; the nearest major emergency and trauma facilities sit roughly 20 miles away in Fayetteville, at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center and Womack Army Medical Center, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety's Hoke County violence profile. For now, the identities of the two men involved remain unknown, and the Hoke County Sheriff's Office has not said whether any physical evidence or witness accounts have been recovered from the Oakdale Gin Road area.
