‘Had to control the chaos’: Southport police chief reflects on mass shooting that shook his hometown

SOUTHPORT, N.C. (WECT) – For Southport Police Chief Todd Coring, every day on the job continues a family legacy. His father and grandfather both served as the police chief of Southport.

“You hear people say, ‘Oh this is my town,’ or you know, ‘I’m the chief,’ but this really is my hometown. I grew up here, at this beach. I played on it, and my dad, we unloaded boats here fishing,” Coring said.

His roots in Southport made what happened off the shoreline more than two months ago all the more emotional for him.

Coring wouldn’t say it’s easy for him to return to the scene of what he calls the darkest night in his career.

“I never would, a million years, would have thought we’d have a shooter here in our waterfront district,” he said.

A gunman opened fire from his boat at American Fish Company, killing three people and injuring several others. Coring remembers every detail as though it were yesterday.

“When I got the call, I thought okay, maybe somebody’s gotten aggravated and maybe shot somebody,” he said.

Then he heard the panic in his officers’ voices over the radio.

“I was numb to it, I was kind of in disbelief riding in,” Coring said. “I remember turning the corner and just seeing the mass amount of emergency responders. People rushing out, I was encountering citizens who were saying, ‘Chief, it’s bad, you need to hurry up.’”

Coring said no amount of training can prepare someone for that moment.

“Just going in and seeing what our responders were having to do and how they were trying to protect and save lives, it’s just numbing and certainly something you don’t prepare to see,” Coring said.

He watched his officers hold pressure on gunshot wounds and perform CPR. At the time, they didn’t know if the shooter was still in the area.

“The American Fish Company is so unique, you look at the front, and you think it’s four walls, but it’s really three walls. That’s what’s so amazing about that location is because the front of it is open to the Cape Fear River,” Coring said. “We were still in an open environment. I was worried I could see a boat or two still in the waterway. So, I went into a defense mode.”

About half an hour later, someone pulled him aside, telling him a suspect had been taken into custody.

“That was the first time that I remember I could kind of take a deep breath and was very hopeful,” he said.

Coring held a press conference on his own around 2 a.m.

“November will be 8 years that I’ve been the chief, and I don’t recall a time that we’ve had an active shooter situation like this, so it’s uh…it’s a bad night for Southport,” he said that night.

The bad night led to a tough day filled with press conferences, reviewing evidence and a vigil at Southport Baptist Church, with Coring and his officers sitting in the front row.

“Don’t recall when I was able to finally get home. It was probably late into Sunday night,” he said.

Since then, Coring has attended court appearances for the suspect, Nigel Edge, who was arrested in Oak Island later that night.

Edge was an Iraq War veteran who suffered a traumatic brain injury while serving. Investigators say that left him with significant mental health issues. He was familiar to the police in Oak Island and had filed more than a dozen lawsuits against them and others in 2025 alone.

Some have criticized law enforcement for not doing more to protect the community from Edge before the shooting ever happened.

“It is a touchy situation. There’s so many things that law enforcement can do, but at some point, it reaches a point,” Coring said. “Honestly, some of that does make us angry that there’s only so much that we can do because, you know, then someone will say we’re violating their gun rights.”

The situation in Southport has brought up conversations about red flag laws or, in North Carolina, the lack of one.

A red flag law allows law enforcement to temporarily take away weapons from someone who has been deemed a danger to themselves or others.

While Coring isn’t ready to say his opinion on the issue, he thinks it’s a conversation worth having.

“I’m certainly doing my research on it to see what it entails and before I decide where my stance on it is, I guess,” he said. “I do want to kind of watch that and certainly be a part of discussions if it should come to that. I think our community needs to get involved with that.”

Beyond dealing with the suspect, Coring’s focus has been on the victims, the community and the well-being of his own officers. He said seeing the way the community came together in the aftermath of the shooting is something he’ll never take for granted.

“You hear it a lot in the community, ‘We appreciate our law enforcement. We back the blue.’ But to see it and to feel it like we have since this, it’s just been, it’s very emotional to me,” he said.

Now Coring wants to use this experience to help other departments.

“If we can help other agencies, you think about beauty from ashes and things like that, if we can train and you know rise up and see some good out of this,” he said.

He hopes this unspeakable tragedy isn’t what his hometown becomes known for.

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