Murder Victim’s Dad Accuses GOP Senate Campaign of Tricking Him into Attack Ad, Says He’s Voting for the Democrat

Screenshot via YouTube.

A North Carolina man whose son was murdered says he was “swindled” into appearing in an ad supporting the Republican Senate candidate, and he’s voting for the Democrat.

In March 2024, Ronald Hayes’ 23-year-old son, Shemar Hayes, was murdered in Charlotte by an 18-year-old who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2025.

The tragic story is the centerpiece of an ad by the Senate Leadership Fund, a PAC that supports Republican Senate candidates and is backing GOP nominee Michael Whatley against former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D).

Whatley is the former chair of the Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party, and Cooper is an attorney with a long résumé in Tar Heel State politics, serving for years in the North Carolina legislature, as the state’s Attorney General, and then governor until 2025.

Cooper has maintained a solid lead over his Republican opponent in recent polling, which may be a motivating factor for several hard-hitting ads attacking Cooper that have been deemed to be misleading, including this one featuring Hayes.

Earlier this month the SLF and Whatley’s campaign were called out for ads, social media posts, and campaign speeches by the candidate that blamed Cooper for the murder of Logan Federico. Critics swiftly pointed out that Federico’s murderer was a South Carolina man, whose criminal record had been racked up in South Carolina, who was released from a South Carolina jail, and who committed the murder mentioned in the ad also in South Carolina — and no connection to Cooper.

The SLF ad with Hayes has similar messaging. In the ad, which has racked up over 26 million views on YouTube, Hayes says his son “was murdered two-and-a-half years ago here in Charlotte” by a “coward” who “shot him five times in the face.”

Hayes is now speaking out about the ad and has told multiple local media outlets that he was presented with a very different reason he was invited to be in the ad. He has written multiple books, worked with the Charlotte police on anti-gun violence measures, and spoken at numerous events.

He told the Greensboro News & Record that the SLF PAC represented to him that it was an “independent” group and that they led him to believe he was participating in an ad about gun violence.

The ad makers interviewed Hayes about his son and at one point asked him to talk like he was talking to then-Gov. Cooper. In the video, Hayes appears to blame Cooper for “letting these criminals back on the streets” and giving them “a second chance” his son would never get.

“Once I saw the ad, I called them and told them they used me,” said Hayes, but they refused to take it down. “I was vulnerable, I was a victim.”

In an interview with NC Newsline Monday, Hayes said he felt he had been “swindled into an ad that was about politics, which I don’t want to be about,” but the ad makers just reiterated they were “independent.”

“I told them that I felt that this was deceiving, it was conniving, and it was sneaky how they used me and my family to get out their word,” said Hayes.

The SLF ad is “a deeply cynical use of a grieving parent’s pain,” wrote NC Voices, among multiple local media outlets that laid out the timeline to illustrate how Shemar Hayes’ murder “could not possibly have been connected” to Cooper’s policies the way the ad portrays it.

The prisoner release the ad references was approved in 2021 in connection with a lawsuit filed against the state during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic over crowded prison conditions. Cooper’s administration initially fought the lawsuit, but after a judge ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits, the state settled the case, worried that proceeding to trial risked a court-ordered release of far more prisoners. Cooper did not order the prisoner release on his own and numerous legal observers estimated continuing to litigate the case risked a court ordering a far more sweeping release.

Shemar Hayes’ killer was a minor at the time of this settlement prisoner release; he was not incarcerated at the time. The murder he committed in 2024 has no logical connection to the release of other prisoners in 2021.

Republicans have made similar baseless accusations that Cooper freed DeCarlos Brown Jr., the man who fatally stabbed Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train, in that prisoner release.

That claim has been debunked by The Charlotte Observer and Politifact, which found that Brown “had served his full sentence at the time of his 2020 release,” and further noted that Brown’s release had come three months before Cooper’s task force had released its report.

As for Hayes, he told the News & Record, he is a Democrat and will not be voting for Whatley: “I’ve voted for Cooper in the past and will continue to do so.”

“I had no intention of trying to sway people one way or the other about who to vote for,” he said. “That’s not what I was doing. I wanted to keep my son’s name alive and relevant. I got nothing against Mr. Cooper.”

The Charlotte Observer published an op-ed Monday by Deputy Opinion Editor Paige Masten in which she excoriated Whatley and his party for “running an egregiously dishonest campaign, creating narratives that ignore established facts and invent new ones out of whole cloth” with these misleading ads.

Masten further lambasted Whatley for having “repeatedly made false statements on social media and the campaign trail” and for how he “continues to shamelessly echo the lie that Cooper was responsible for the murder of Iryna Zarutska,” including his campaign posting footage of her murder, expressly against her family’s stated wishes.

“Whatley and his allies often fail to meet even the lowest standards of honesty,” wrote Masten. “It’s yet another sign of a desperate, flailing campaign — and a sign that Whatley’s party has little faith that he can succeed on his own.”

Masten noted the ads “haven’t significantly cut into Cooper’s lead or his popularity with voters,” but “[t]hat doesn’t make them any less wrong — or damaging.”

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