Louise DeKler was 98 years old. Lillian Dunn was 89. Margaret Johnson was 89. Jesse Vernon Musser was 88. John Walter Goldston was 78. Bessie Hedrick was 78. Tessie Garner was 75. Two of the residents were in their wheelchairs when they were shot. The staff at Pinelake - a 120-bed nursing home in the small Moore County seat of Carthage - tried to move other patients to safety as Stewart walked the halls searching for his wife. Jerry Avant Jr., a 39-year-old nurse working that Sunday morning, tried to stop the gunman. Avant was the only employee killed. The names matter because what mass shootings do in the news cycle is collapse human beings into statistics - 'eight dead at a North Carolina nursing home' - and then move on. These eight were not statistics. They were grandparents and friends and patients and a young man on shift who chose, in the seconds he had, to put himself between a gun and the people in his care.

Carthage had one police officer on duty that Sunday. His name was Justin Garner. He was 25. When the first emergency calls came in at about 10:00 a.m., he was dispatched alone to the scene. Five minutes later he was inside the nursing home, facing Stewart in a hallway. He gave Stewart several orders to drop his weapon. Stewart lowered his shotgun and fired - three pellets caught Garner in the left leg. Garner returned fire and put Stewart down with a single round to the chest. The shooting ended. Six were already dead in the building; two more died at the hospital the same day. Five wounded survivors made it through, including Stewart himself. Garner, a young officer responding alone to a mass shooting with multiple firearms in play, kept the death toll from getting any higher. He survived his wounds. Later he would tell reporters he was not a hero - the people who tried to shield patients in the halls were.

Stewart was charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. His defense attorneys argued that he had been taking the prescription sleep medication Ambien for two years and was under its influence the morning of the shooting - therefore, they said, incapable of the premeditation that first-degree murder requires under North Carolina law. The prosecution presented evidence that Stewart had carried out elaborate planning in the days before and the hours of the attack: a camouflaged Remington 597 rifle staged on top of his Jeep Cherokee, three loaded firearms carried in (a .357 Magnum revolver, a .22 Magnum semi-automatic pistol, and a Winchester 12-gauge shotgun), a route plotted to the Alzheimer's unit where Wanda had been reassigned. On September 3, 2011, a Moore County jury convicted Stewart of eight counts of second-degree murder. The judge handed down consecutive maximum sentences - 15 years 9 months to 19 years 8 months on each count - for a total of 179 years, 4 months, and 20 days. As of late 2024, Stewart remains incarcerated at Neuse Correctional Institution in Goldsboro.

The town of Carthage held a memorial service on April 19, 2009, three weeks after the shooting. WRAL filmed it. The chairs filled. Family members spoke. The names of the eight were read aloud, slowly, as a single bell rang for each. Carthage is a small town - the population is under 3,000 - and in a place that size, a loss like this is not abstract. Almost everyone knew at least one of the residents. Many knew Jerry Avant. The Pinelake facility continued operating after the attack, and the residents who survived stayed where they had lived for years. The Moore County hospice and the community held grief groups for months. The shooting remains the deadliest mass shooting in North Carolina history. The Pinelake building is still there. So is the dignity of the eight who died - which Wikipedia documents by listing their names, which courts protected by sentencing their killer to die in prison, and which this story tries, however imperfectly, to honor by remembering them first.