RALEIGH, North Carolina — A car theft at a Raleigh gas station in the early hours of Wednesday ended with both people involved under arrest: the woman accused of stealing the car, and its owner, who police say fired shot after shot at his own vehicle as it was driven away — with one of the bullets ending up in a Raleigh police station across the road, according to court records reported by WRAL.

Source: WRAL News, Nov. 11, 2026

Raleigh police say the sequence began around 2:50 a.m. on Wednesday, November 11, at the Sheetz convenience store and gas station on Glenwood Avenue in northwest Raleigh. A woman got into a man's car in the parking lot and tried to steal it while he was inside the store, police said. The car had been left running.

As the woman began driving away, the car's owner — identified by police as Darryl Avery Fulton, 59 — fired several shots into the air, police said. He then turned the gun on his own car and fired at it, hitting the vehicle several times as it left the lot, according to police accounts reported by WRAL and WTVD.

What the arrest warrants say

The woman, Essence Larita Abraham, 29, was not injured in the shooting. Police found her near the scene, still with the stolen vehicle, and arrested her there, WRAL reported. The arrest warrants in her case state, in the words quoted by WRAL: “defendant was extremely intoxicated, defendant took the vehicle while it was running at a store.”

Abraham is charged with two felonies — larceny of a motor vehicle and possession of a stolen motor vehicle. She was booked into the Wake County Detention Center under a $25,000 bond, according to WRAL's reporting of the warrants and jail records.

The owner is charged too — with a felony of his own

Fulton, the car's owner, faces a felony charge of discharging a weapon into an occupied vehicle, plus two misdemeanours: discharging a firearm within city limits and assault with a deadly weapon, police said. He is also being held at the Wake County Detention Center — but in his case, a judge denied bond altogether.

The release order in Fulton's case, reported by WRAL, contains a notable detail: the judge recorded that Fulton did not have a relevant criminal history or a history of failing to appear in court, and that he “was also the victim of his vehicle being stolen.” He was nevertheless ordered held without bond on the charges arising from the shooting itself.

Why firing at your own stolen car is a serious crime in North Carolina

North Carolina law treats discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle as a felony in its own right — the law is written around the danger to the person inside the vehicle and to everyone nearby, not around who owns the car. A vehicle being driven away is also no longer an immediate threat to the owner standing in a parking lot, which is why a theft victim's decision to shoot at it exposes them to exactly the kind of charges Fulton now faces: a stray round in a public place can hit a bystander, a passing driver — or, as the court records in this case show, a police station across the street.

The scene is a familiar one for overnight travellers and shift workers across the Triangle: Glenwood Avenue is the U.S. 70 corridor running northwest out of downtown Raleigh toward Durham, lined with 24-hour stores that serve night-shift workers, truckers and early-morning commuters. Police searched the grounds around the Sheetz for evidence after the shooting, WRAL reported, and the investigation file now runs through the warrants and court records in both cases.

What happens next

Abraham and Fulton are both scheduled to appear in court on Thursday, November 12, at 1:30 p.m. in Wake County. Every charge in both cases is an allegation only: Abraham is accused of taking the car, Fulton is accused of unlawfully firing at it, and each is presumed innocent unless and until the charges are proven in court. Police have released no further details about the gun used, how many shots were fired in total, or whether the damaged car has been returned to its owner.