Former Army captain charged with shooting two women on his front lawn
Police also found the body of a dog they say Hardman shot.
A former Army infantry officer and West Point graduate is charged with shooting and killing two women on the front lawn of his home in a suburban neighborhood outside Raleigh, North Carolina, along with a dog found dead at the scene.
Police in Apex say Harry Hardman, a 2009 West Point graduate, shot the women soon after they confronted him for causing a “disturbance” on his front lawn in the town’s South Walk Townhomes subdivisions, where both Hardman and the women lived. Apex is about five miles west of Raleigh.
Police say neighbors had already called police to report Hardman for “loud” behavior when he “produced” a gun and shot both women, 69-year-old Nancy Taylor and Gabrielle Raymond, 37.
Raleigh news station WRAL reported that in a video of the incident sent to the station by a neighbor, a man is heard yelling for violence against “graduates and students of MIT, Harvard and more” and yelling for “‘cleansing of the country’ as the ‘final solution.’”
When police arrived, Hardman had returned to his home.
“As officers moved to set up a perimeter around the residence they encountered Mr. Hardman exiting the back door of the residence holding an AR-15 rifle,” Apex police said in a Facebook post. “Officers instructed him to drop the weapon, which he did, and he was taken into custody without incident.”
The AR-15, police said, was not the gun Hardman used to shoot the two women. A search of Hardman’s home revealed multiple firearms, police said.
Police also found the body of a dog they say Hardman shot.
Hardman was charged with two counts of murder and one count of animal cruelty during a court appearance in Raleigh Tuesday.
Hardman is a 2009 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, according to a database maintained by the West Point Association of Graduates. An Army spokesperson told Task & Purpose that Hardman was an infantry officer and financial manager while in the Army from May 2009 to August 2015.
The Army said he deployed to Kosovo from February 2012 to April 2012.
UPDATE: (Jan 17, 2024); This story has been updated with a description of a video reported by Raleigh news station WRAL.
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