By: Shawn Vincent

Twenty-four-year-old Gyrell Lee fired eight rounds from his .45-caliber pistol and killed twenty-one-year-old Quinton Epps on Shepard Street in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, after midnight on New Year’s Day, 2013. Lee, a licensed concealed carrier, had been celebrating New Year’s Eve at a neighbor’s house with his twenty-three-year-old cousin, Jamieal Walker. Epps had been by the house repeatedly through the night to argue with Walker, each pass more aggressive than the last.

During the final encounter, a car containing Epps as a passenger drove slowly past Lee and Walker, and then pulled away. Lee walked out to his own car, collected his .45 pistol, and put the gun in his waistband. He later told police he took it “out of instinct,” though he added that Epps “wasn’t a threat at that time.” The car came by again, and then parked near a house three doors away.

Lee and Walker walked down the street to talk to Epps. The confrontation quickly erupted into an argument between Walker and Epps. Walker punched Epps in the face. Epps grabbed Walker’s hoodie, shot Walker twice in the stomach, and kept firing as Walker turned to flee. Epps then turned his gun on Lee. Lee fired eight rounds and killed him. Walker ran, collapsed behind a nearby house, and died there. 

Lee ran from the scene, hid his pistol under a trash can, and failed to call 9-1-1. Police found him and picked him up roughly twelve hours later. In interviews and later in a recorded jailhouse phone call, Lee said he had wanted to fire earlier to protect Walker but could not get “a clear shot” through the two men’s struggle.

Lee was charged with first-degree murder, and he faced trial in July 2015. The State’s argument to the jury included one witness’s account that Lee had fired at least one round through Epps after Epps was already on the ground, and during deliberations the jury asked to see a photograph of a divot in the asphalt beneath the body. After nine hours, the panel reported it was deadlocked. The judge sent them back. That night, at eleven-thirty, they returned a verdict of second-degree murder. Two jurors cried while confirming it. The sentence: sixteen to twenty years.

The defense appealed the conviction, and while the North Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict, the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed the decision and ordered a new trial. Justices found that the trial judge had agreed to give the pattern self-defense instruction with its “no duty to retreat” language and had then silently omitted it when charging the jury. According to the Supreme Court opinion, “During closing arguments, the State contended that defendant should have retreated because a reasonable person in defendant’s shoes would have ‘removed himself from the situation’ and ‘run[ ] away.'”

The retrial never happened. On May 20, 2025—twelve years and four months after the shooting, and seven years after the reversal—the prosecutor dismissed the case. The State’s primary witness had since been charged with perjury and convicted of a sex offense, and was serving a lengthy prison sentence. Other witnesses had been uncooperative. “Thus,” the prosecutor wrote, “the State can not rebut the defendant’s assertion of self-defense.” By the time the case finally closed, Lee had spent about five hundred days in pretrial detention and roughly three years in prison on the vacated conviction, and had lived under the threat of a new murder trial for another seven.

Lessons for Armed Defenders

Don’t be the first aggressor (Lesson #10)

Legally, Lee was not the first aggressor—his cousin Walker was, when Walker threw the punch that started the shooting. That distinction helped preserve Lee’s self-defense claim as a matter of law, as noted in North Carolina’s Supreme Court evaluation. The 2015 jury did not draw the distinction. Lee had walked down the street alongside Walker with his own .45 already tucked in his waistband. The jury may have held Lee partly responsible for his cousin’s act of aggression, and combined with other legal challenges, it may have pushed him towards conviction. 

 

Don’t leave a place of safety to confront a threat (Lesson #14)

Before Epps returned and stopped three doors down, Lee was safe at a neighbor’s house. He didn’t need to go to the trouble. Steve Moses says: “If you have a potential issue with a third person, going over there and confronting them and taking a gun just in case, no matter what happens, it’s not gonna be a happy ending.” When a defender walks toward a fight rather than away from it, they’ll have to account for that decision if the encounter becomes violent. 

Don’t stand your ground (Lesson #15)

North Carolina is a stand-your-ground state, and Lee had no duty to retreat when Epps shot Walker and turned the gun on the defender. Even if Lee had been in a duty-to-retreat state, his lawyers could have argued that, given the circumstances of the shooting, he had no opportunity to retreat safely. While the Supreme Court specifically cited the prosecution’s legally problematic suggestion that Lee could have “removed himself from the situation,” the law can’t stop a jury from considering that sentiment, if it occurs to them. The stand-your-ground concept is best seen as a legal tool for criminal defense lawyers. For armed defenders, adopting a duty-to-retreat mindset—when it is safe to do so—reduces the legal jeopardy of using deadly force in self-defense. 

Don’t shoot AFTER the threat is over (Lesson #7)

The State’s theory at trial was that Lee did not stop firing when Epps fell—that at least one of the eight rounds went through Epps as he lay on the pavement. While that witness later lost credibility, he appeared before the 2015 jury, along with photographs of a divot in the asphalt beneath Epps—which the jury requested during deliberations. By implication, the prosecutors suggested Lee kept shooting even after he had eliminated the threat. Don West’s shorthand is “you can’t shoot too soon, you can’t shoot too late, it has to be just right.” 

Call 9-1-1 (Lesson #30)

After the shooting, Lee did none of the things that we’d expect a justified armed defender to do. He ran from the scene, hid the pistol under a trash can, and left the police to find him about twelve hours later—after failing to self-report the shooting to authorities. Don West says, “The prosecutor looks at this stuff and screams consciousness of guilt. They say, ‘This isn’t an innocent guy.’ He is thinking that he better get out of there and then compounding that by thinking he better get rid of the evidence.” If Lee had called in the shooting, police would have begun their investigation with the defender’s claim. As it was, when authorities finally found Lee, they initially suspected him of Walker’s death as well. 

 

Understand the legal consequences (Lesson #3)

Lee ultimately won his legal battle, but only after a twelve-year legal odyssey. He spent more than four years of that period behind bars, and he lived the remaining eight years under constant threat that the prosecution would move forward.  

As Don West has put it, there are “certainly points as you take that journey from the beginning to end of the criminal justice process that you may very well want to second-guess your decision to use deadly force.” If Lee had known the legal jeopardy associated with taking his gun to the confrontation in the street, he likely would have stayed at his neighbor’s house and waited for the trouble to blow over.