The Yacht Basin was a working harbor once. By 2025 it had become Southport's entertainment district, with restaurants, a boat rental company, a tour operator, and a seafood market clustered along the water. The neighborhood drew over 850,000 visits in the year leading up to the attack. Southport's waterfront has stood in for fictional small-town America in I Know What You Did Last Summer, Safe Haven, and Dawson's Creek. The American Fish Company sat at the heart of it. On a late September Saturday, the deck was full of patrons listening to live music and watching the boats come in off the Cape Fear River.

The first calls came in just after 9:30 p.m. Four minutes later, the first officer reached the scene. The shooter had left the bar a minute before that. Officers from Boiling Spring Lakes and Southport entered the building without knowing whether another shooter remained inside, and they began applying tourniquets and performing CPR. One victim was in cardiac arrest. Emergency medical services arrived within seven minutes of the first call. The U.S. Coast Guard was contacted a minute after that. By shortly after 10 p.m., the Coast Guard had spotted a boat matching the description at a public ramp in Oak Island, where the suspect was loading it onto a trailer. They detained him there and handed him to local police.

The man arrested had been Sean William Debevoise until 2023, when he legally changed his name to Nigel Edge. He was born October 23, 1984, in Suffern, New York, and raised in nearby New City. He graduated from Clarkstown High School North in 2003 and served in the Marines from September of that year through June 2009. His decorations included a Purple Heart, the Combat Action Ribbon for Iraq, and the Iraq Campaign Medal with two bronze stars. A 2017 Star-News story described him as a former Marine sniper who had been shot four times during a 2006 raid on an Al Zaidan warehouse. He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to court records and his own writings. He was charged with three counts of first-degree murder among eighteen felony counts. In April 2026, after multiple mental evaluations found him incompetent to stand trial, a court ordered him into psychiatric treatment intended to restore his competency; he remained in custody, charged but not convicted.

In 2012, Edge had escorted country singer Kellie Pickler to the CMT Music Awards with his service dog Rusty. In February 2025, he sued Pickler, alleging she had tried to poison his drink. In May, he confronted a former classmate and friend at the man's workplace and accused him of identity theft. The friend filed for a protective order, writing that Edge always carried a pistol and was on high doses of medications that left him anxious. Edge filed another lawsuit alleging that his former wife, the friend, an ex-girlfriend, and a fellow Marine from his first Iraq deployment were conspiring to sex-traffic and kill him. District Attorney Jon David later said Edge had only minor prior contacts with law enforcement, nothing that signaled this attack.

Three families lost someone that night. Six wounded survivors, including three Oak Island residents and visitors from Afton, Virginia, Amityville, New York, and Wheaton, Illinois, were eventually released from the hospital. The last left on October 3. The local nonprofit Southport Cares raised more than $346,000 and distributed funds to 34 families and wounded patrons and employees. Over a thousand people attended a vigil at Southport Baptist Church on September 28. The Billy Graham Rapid Response Team sent eight chaplains. Governor Josh Stein visited the same day and called for mental health reform and a red flag gun law. On November 20, four Boiling Spring Lakes officers and a Southport officer received the Medal of Valor for entering the bar when they did not know whether the threat was still inside. Coring described the shooting as the darkest night of his career.