Two people were shot outside The Bison bar on East Whitaker Mill Road in a September 2021 incident, leaving one victim wounded in the head and the other in the neck.
According to WRAL, Raleigh police responded to the bar after two people were shot just before midnight on a Thursday in April 2021; that report did not identify the victims. Separately, CBS 17 reported that gunfire happened around 2:30 a.m. Thursday in September 2021 outside The Bison, located at 815 E. Whitaker Mill Road. CBS 17 identified the victims as 36-year-old Rakim Durell Hocutt and 40-year-old Nakia Dawon Moore.
In the April 2021 case, investigators described the investigation as very “fluid and active” and said they were working to determine a motive. In the September case, police were investigating and seeking information. Per CBS 17's account of the September shooting, detectives had interviewed people who found the two victims outside the bar but had not yet spoken with anyone who actually witnessed the shooting.
A Bar With a Repeat History of Violence
This is not the first time The Bison has made headlines for gunfire. CBS 17 notes the bar was the scene of another double shooting on April 1, when two men were shot around 11:30 p.m. Jason Lamonte Winstead, 28, was arrested and charged with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and inflicting serious injury in connection with that earlier case.
WRAL's broader crime-data review found 28 aggravated-assault calls within a one-mile radius of the bar since January 2020, underscoring a pattern of violence in the immediate area even as the city's overall numbers have shifted. The Bison shooting also came in the same stretch as another incident: about an hour later, a shooting near a nightclub in a shopping center on N. Market Drive left one man dead, according to CBS 17. Police said that shooting was reported about an hour after the Bison shooting.
Citywide Numbers Show a Mixed Picture
Raleigh's own first-quarter data for 2026 shows a mixed trend. The city recorded 17 non-fatal shooting incidents in that period, down 11% from 19 during the same stretch in 2025, and homicide incidents fell sharply, from 11 to four, a 64% drop. But total assault incidents rose 7% over the same comparison, climbing from 1,734 to 1,855, according to the Raleigh Police Department's quarterly crime data.
The investigation into the September shooting at The Bison remains open, and police have not released further details on what led to the gunfire. Detectives continue working to piece together what happened outside the bar and identify anyone involved.
