A federal grand jury indicted Kenneth Maurice Quick Jr. in early August, those charges unsealed on Friday when they were announced by U.S. Attorney Michael Easley involving murder, drugs, firearms and obstruction.
The attorney's office released a statement reading that it is, "alleged Quick committed first-degree murder by shooting a victim on Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) on December 1, 2020. In addition, it is alleged Quick used a firearm to murder a second victim that same day. The murder of the second victim was in relation to a separate charge for conspiracy to distribute cocaine."
While the names of the victims are not given in the press release, Master Sgt. William "Billy" Lavigne, 37, and U.S. Army veteran Timothy Dumas, 44, were found shot to death on the base then called Fort Bragg on Dec. 2, 2020, and were believed to have been killed the night prior.
From the beginning, the case involved a tangled web of personalities, and criminality, surrounding the Fort Bragg drug culture. In March 2018, Levigne shot and killed one of his best friends, Sgt. First Class Mark Leshikar. He claimed it was in self-defense, but as Connecting Vets reported in 2020 there were, and are, numerous inconsistencies in the story he told.
Levigne was moved out of Delta Force afterward, but remained in the Army and had other run-ins with the law on drug-related charges until the morning he was found shot to death on a Fort Bragg training site with Dumas.
According to a North Carolina law enforcement source who spoke to Connecting Vets on the condition of anonymity, Dumas was involved in international drug trafficking with former Highway Patrol officer Freddy Huff, who was charged with two counts of drug trafficking, two counts of armed robbery and one count of kidnapping in Aug. 2021.
Officially, Huff was fired for selling state-issued sneakers on eBay. That was when he started an import/export business selling washers and dryers in Mexico, and at some point decided to start bringing products back on his return trips as well. As a former police officer, he knew exactly how to fool the drug-sniffing dogs at the border checkpoints.
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Huff was eventually arrested for impersonating a police officer with a partner in crime (we're told it was someone close to Dumas), staging a raid on a rival drug gang. When police caught up with Huff and placed him under arrest he had in his possession, "$300,000.00 in cash, over 11,000 grams (24.25 pounds) of cocaine, in excess of 60,000 grams (132.2 pounds) of methamphetamine and over 1700 grams (3.7 pounds) of heroin — having an estimated street value of over $7.3 million."
Dumas and Huff knew each other through the drug smuggling and distribution scene, and there have been allegations that Dumas maintained connections on Fort Bragg but how he came into the orbit of Levigne remains a mystery.
Quick is already serving 57 months on an unrelated conviction. In May 2022, a police officer in Laurinburg pulled him over for speeding and he attempted to flee, throwing drugs and firearms out of the window of his car. Police officers caught up with him and placed him under arrest.
That was not his first interaction with law enforcement, his priors include an arrest for the shooting death of Monterrio Taylor in April 2021, and another arrest in 2016, "after three children were shot in the leg after a party at a home on Vance Street in Laurinburg. He was 16 years old at the time," local news reported.
The deaths of Levigne and Dumas remain under investigation by the FBI and Army CID.
Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR.
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