Items found on the grounds of Sherrills Ford Elementary School this past Monday pointed to something unsettling: a firearm had been discharged there two days earlier, over the weekend, while the campus sat empty. By Thursday, Catawba County investigators had an arrest in hand, naming a 52-year-old local man as the suspect behind the gunfire.
According to a media release from the Catawba County Sheriff's Office, provided by Public Information Officer Lieutenant Dane Hoyle, investigators reviewed school surveillance footage after the items were discovered and determined that an adult male had fired a weapon on the property the previous Sunday. As whky.com reported, school was not in session at the time, and no students or staff were present during the incident.
The break in the case came two days later, when investigators turned to Flock Safety camera footage to narrow down a suspect. That review led them to identify David Carlos Davidson, a 52-year-old Sherrills Ford resident, per the same account. Davidson was arrested and served with warrants this Thursday, charged with discharging a firearm on educational property, possession of a firearm on educational property, and cruelty to animals.
Bond Set at $8,000 Ahead of Court Date
Davidson received an $8,000 secured bond following his arrest and was scheduled to appear in Catawba County District Court on Friday, the station's report notes. The sheriff's office release does not detail how the firearm came to be discharged, what prompted the animal cruelty charge, or why Davidson was allegedly on school property in the first place, leaving several basic questions about the case still unanswered.
What North Carolina Law Says About the Charges
Under North Carolina General Statutes, willfully discharging a firearm of any kind on educational property is a Class F felony unless another law calls for a harsher punishment, with the statute specifically excluding BB guns, stun guns, air rifles and air pistols from that provision. Separately, the cruelty to animals charge falls under a different section of state law, which classifies maliciously torturing, mutilating, maiming, cruelly beating, disfiguring, poisoning or killing an animal as a Class H felony.
A Statewide Decline in School Weapons Offenses
The Sherrills Ford case lands amid a broader downward trend in school weapons incidents across North Carolina. Criminal weapons-related offenses in the state's public schools fell to 1,875 during the 2024-25 school year, down from 2,378 the year before, according to WRAL — the lowest figure reported since statewide tracking began in 2006-07. Total criminal offenses of all kinds in North Carolina schools dropped from 12,212 to 11,470 over that same period.
Some districts have responded to lingering safety concerns with new screening technology even as the overall numbers improve. WRAL reports that Person County Schools has rolled out Evolv weapons scanners across multiple county buildings, while Sampson County has planned to deploy OpenGate detection systems at nine schools, including every middle and high school in the county. Those OpenGate systems are designed to scan people and backpacks at entry points, using signal processing meant to tell harmless metal objects apart from genuine threats.
