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The Senate Leadership Fund launched a heart-wrenching ad this month connecting former Gov. Roy Cooper and the release of 3,500 North Carolina inmates to the fatal shooting of a Waxhaw woman.
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The problem is the homicide took place in South Carolina and the suspect has no connection to North Carolina’s prison system.
“Obviously, if you watch it, you can definitely read into it as if it occurred in North Carolina,” said Chris Gustafson, communications director for SLF.
But Gustafson defended the ad connecting Cooper’s actions and the unrelated killing. “At the end of the day, it’s a North Carolina dad who is an advocate for stopping these kinds of policies,” he said.
Cooper’s team called the ad “false.”
“This heinous crime was committed in South Carolina by a South Carolina criminal, but a Republican super PAC is using this tragedy for political gain,” said Jordan Monaghan, a spokesman for Cooper.
Cooper, a Democrat from Raleigh, is running for U.S. Senate against former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley of Gastonia.
And Republicans have repeatedly tried to tie Cooper to various crimes due a court-ordered settlement, in 2021, that led to the early release of 3,500 prisoners in North Carolina in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
But this homicide has no connection to North Carolina other than the victim being from Union County.
On May 3, 2025, Logan Federico visited friends at a home in Columbia, South Carolina, when, police said, 30-year-old Alexander Dickey entered the home and killed her.
The ad is emotional to watch.
Federico’s father, Stephen, sits on a front porch and explains how his daughter was killed.
“Logan was the most caring, loving person,” he says. “It was a home invasion. Went to the house where Logan was sleeping, and he pulled her out of bed, forced her on her knees and stuck a shotgun in the left side of her chest and pulled the trigger. For no reason.”
The emotions left behind from what happened to Stephen Federico’s daughter are evident in his voice. It cracks as he retells the story.
As he talks on camera, words from news clippings appear on screen: “The man accused of killing her faced nearly 40 criminal charges” and “Roy Cooper: Released 3,500 North Carolina prisoners.”
Stephen Federico says his daughter was a casualty of an agenda.
“Roy Cooper let 3,500 criminals out on the street,” he says. “Eighteen of them were murderers.”
In 2020, several activist groups appealed to Cooper, who served as governor, to release 18,000 prisoners due to the pandemic. That’s around half the state’s prison population.
While President Donald Trump, Congress, governors in several other states, and county officials around North Carolina did so, Cooper refused.
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The activists took the state to court, and a judge sided with them, saying that the pandemic caused conditions within the prison system that he would likely find to be unconstitutional.
That led to the settlement to release 3,500 prisoners.
“After Roy fought against these releases in court, North Carolina law enforcement officials and parole officers looked to similar criteria President Trump used a year prior when his administration released thousands of federal prisoners due to COVID-19,” Monaghan said.
Monaghan added that Cooper spent his career putting “rapists and violent criminals behind bars and signing tough on crime laws as governor.”
All of those prisoners released in the settlement were either already out of prison and included on the list or set to be released before the end of the year.
And Dickey was not among them.
Public records show Dickey has no inmate nor criminal history in North Carolina.
When asked if Senate Leadership Fund was misleading North Carolina voters into believing that Cooper was involved in Federico’s death, Gustafson said the ad is about the policy.
Stephen Federico “is very passionate about this issue, and the matter of the fact is that the policies obviously was under (South Carolina Gov. Henry) McMaster, but the same policies that led to his daughter’s death are what the 3,500 inmates in North Carolina are,” Gustafson said.
But that’s not true.
The ACLU sued McMaster, a Republican, and other South Carolina officials to release prisoners during the pandemic, but a judge dismissed the case.
Dickey is a career criminal with around 39 past charges, 25 of which were felonies.
But some of those charges weren’t on Federico’s official record, causing consternation between South Carolina officials about whether that allowed Dickey to be out of prison when Federico was killed.
The Lexington County Sheriff’s Office admitted its officials failed to reenter Dickey’s fingerprints into the South Carolina criminal database, though it wasn’t clear if this was human or machine error, The State reported. New charges can only be attached to someone’s record once that happens.
“At the end of the day, it is a North Carolinian citizen talking about the kind of that policy,” Gustafson said. “It is not specifically that Cooper did it. I mean, obviously it’s a political ad. So if people want to read into it like that, then I’m not really here to tell them not to.”
He added that he’s thankful he said that there are more ads coming that are crystal clear.
Asked how he squares the criticism of Cooper with Trump signing into law the CARES Act, passed by Congress, that released around 24,000 federal prisoners into home confinement or halfway houses, he said he wasn’t here “to defend the president.”
Instead, he said, he was here to defend the ad. In a written statement to McClatchy after this article published, Gustafson added: “Roy Cooper let thousands of violent criminals like Alexander Dickey out of prison and endangered North Carolinians. We’ll keep reminding voters of Cooper’s deadly record.”
“At the end of the day, this is an election about Roy Cooper and his policies versus what Michael Whatley supports,” Gustafson said earlier. “If the president had federal policies that impacted North Carolina, then you know that was one thing. But you know, this is specifically about the state and not federal government.”
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This story was originally published September 2, 2026 at 5:00 AM.