Background: Police officers investigate a shooting at the Avalon Fishing Pier on Thursday, July 31, 2025 (WAVY/YouTube). Inset: Shooting victim Zane Hughes (GoFundMe).
An afternoon shooting at a popular fishing pier on the coast of North Carolina has disturbed the beach town – with a teenager at the heart of the case.
Henry Lee Hargis, 16, has been charged with first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill, inflicting serious injury, according to Dare County court records. He is being held on no bond.
The shooting unfolded at about 2:30 p.m. on Thursday at the Avalon Fishing Pier in Kill Devil Hills. The pier was crowded as shots rang out, witnesses later recounted.
“The people at the pier, and under the pier… soon as I seen them scrambling, running, jumping off, I was like, “that was a gun,'” Justin Smiley, a man at the beach, told NBC affiliate WAVY.
Hargis is accused of shooting and killing Zane Hughes, 19, in the parking lot of the pier, as well as injuring a 15-year-old boy. It is unclear what led to the fatal crime, but both the suspect and 19-year-old victim lived in the area – Hargis is from Kill Devil Hills and Hughes was from Colington, the Kill Devil Hills Police Department said.
Officers said Hughes was dead when they arrived. The younger victim had been shot in the leg, and he was airlifted to a hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. He is expected to be OK.
Hargis was not at the crime scene, but about 45 minutes after police arrived, after having identified him as their suspect, they found his car, pulled him over, and detained him. The shooting was “isolated and targeted,” the police department said.
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The Avalon Pier said the shooting occurred as one of the people involved was walking off the beach. According to them, the 15-year-old was hit by a ricocheted bullet.
“Yesterday, our property was used as an end to a feud between two young individuals as one of them was coming off the beach,” a social media post said on Friday. “This community is currently doing some serious soul-searching from this incident.”
According to a GoFundMe set up for the younger victim, he was shot in the thigh, and, after being hospitalized, “the bullet will stay in his leg permanently” because it is near his femoral artery.
Police have been searching for why the “targeted” killing took place.
“We are fully committed to a thorough investigation, and a thorough investigation takes time,” said Kill Devil Hills Assistant Police Chief Dana Harris, per ABC affiliate WVEC. “Our detectives are processing evidence, interviewing witnesses, working closely with partnering agencies, and doing everything possible to understand exactly what happened and why.”
Hargis is being held in a nearby juvenile detention center. He has a probable cause hearing set for next Tuesday.
Kill Devil Hills is a small beach town on the Outer Banks, a line of islands off the coast of North Carolina.
