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 well-known fishing pier in North Carolina has shocked the beachside community, with a teenager central to the investigation.
Henry Lee Hargis, aged 16, faces charges of first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill, causing serious injury, as indicated by Dare County court documents. He is currently being detained without bail.
The incident occurred around 2:30 p.m. on Thursday at the Avalon Fishing Pier in Kill Devil Hills. The area was teeming with people when gunshots erupted, according to witness accounts.
“People at the pier, and underneath it… as soon as I saw them scrambling, running, jumping off, I thought, ‘that was a gun,'” Justin Smiley, who was present at the beach, told NBC affiliate WAVY.
Hargis is accused of fatally shooting Zane Hughes, 19, in the pier’s parking lot and also injuring a 15-year-old boy. The motive behind the crime remains unclear, but both the suspect and the victim were locals—Hargis from Kill Devil Hills and Hughes from Colington, the Kill Devil Hills Police Department stated.
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.
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.
