A former North Carolina police officer who was accused of planning to carry out a mass shooting in New Orleans was quietly released over the summer after a grand jury did not indict him, according to state court records.
The former officer, Christopher Gillum of Chapel Hill, N.C., had been held without bond in Louisiana on a state terrorism charge that carried up to a 15-year sentence. He was not believed to be facing any other charges, according to prosecutors and his lawyer.
Mr. Gillum, 45, was arrested in April in Florida after law enforcement authorities determined that he had planned to travel to a large festival in New Orleans to carry out a mass shooting and “commit suicide by cop,” officials said.
Sheriff’s deputies in Okaloosa County, Fla., arrested him on a Louisiana warrant. They recovered a handgun and about 200 rounds of ammunition from his hotel room, they said at the time.
Mr. Gillum, who has been investigated by the F.B.I. and the authorities in Louisiana, North Carolina and Florida, was extradited to Louisiana from Florida shortly after the arrest. He had been held at a local jail without bond.
His lawyer, Dylan Utley, said in an interview on Wednesday that the reports against Mr. Gillum “were unfortunate and inaccurate.”
Mr. Utley said that “the facts in this case did not support the specific threat to the people of New Orleans and the people of Louisiana that was originally reported.”
It’s unclear when he was freed, but court records show that an Orleans Parish grand jury declined to indict him in June. His release was first reported by The Associated Press on Tuesday.
“To our best understanding, his family took him to a treatment facility out of the state,” Lester Duhé, a spokesman for the Louisiana attorney general, Liz Murrill, said in a statement. He added that the state would not pursue further charges.
Mr. Gillum was an officer for the Chapel Hill Police Department from 2004 until his resignation in 2019. He returned to the department briefly in 2024, but left before the end of the year. Officials there did not say why he resigned, returned, and left again.
He worked for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina as a detention officer from 2023 to 2024. Mr. Gillum returned to the sheriff’s office as a deputy in January 2025, before resigning that September. He was recognized as an “officer of the month” during that time.
Mr. Duhé said that there were several jurisdictional issues that presented challenges in prosecuting the case, and that the investigators were not to blame.
Among those issues, he said, was that the original threat attributed to Mr. Gillum, which was vaguely relayed to a family member, occurred in North Carolina, but Mr. Gillum was arrested in Florida and he had not gone to Louisiana after the threat and before his arrest.
Later, there were indications that Mr. Gillum had planned to travel to the Florida Keys with a woman during the same period in which he would have been expected to travel to Louisiana for the suspected attack.
The F.B.I. office in New Orleans said on Wednesday that “prosecution decisions are strictly determined by a local prosecutor like the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office or the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
Though officials would not confirm what event was the subject of the reported threat, the multiday New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as Jazz Fest, began one day after his arrest on April 22. The festival typically draws about 400,000 attendees, according to its website.
Ms. Murrill, the attorney general, said in a statement that even though the charges were declined, she was grateful that state and federal law enforcement officials “coordinated and successfully stopped this individual in Florida from carrying out whatever it was he was planning, wherever he might have been planning to carry it out.”
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