A former North Carolina cop — once awarded “police officer of the month” — allegedly plotted to gun down black people at a Louisiana festival, authorities said.
Christopher Gillum, of Chapel Hill, was wanted in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, for making “terroristic threats” and tracked by authorities to a hotel in Florida where he was arrested Wednesday night, according to the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office.
Gillum had allegedly been “heading to do a mass shooting at a large festival in Louisiana,” when he was found with roughly 200 rounds of ammunition and a handgun in his hotel room on Scenic Highway 98, cops said.
Though authorities didn’t identify the festival Gillum planned to attack, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which routinely attracts hundreds of thousands of patrons, was slated to begin Thursday.
The ex-cop family’s had reported him missing on Tuesday — telling police he had a gun and “expressed recent threats to harm black people,” according to a bulletin from Burlington police and Lt. Clint Lyons of the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office.
But Gillum fled North Carolina before paperwork could be prepared to involuntarily commit him to psychiatric treatment, Lyons said.
He was eventually stopped by police in Okaloosa County on Wednesday, but did not “present any grounds for involuntary commitment or criminal charges,” according to police, who let Gillum drive away while telling officers he was headed to “New Orleans.”
Deputies were asked to make a “welfare check” on him on Wednesday morning, but were unaware he had made violent threats. Later that day, after learning about his alleged plot, he was surveilled and arrested on a warrant from Louisiana, police officials said.
Gillum was a Chapel Hill cop from 2004 up until his 2019 resignation, a town spokesperson told The Post.
He then was in and out of various law enforcement jobs — first as a cop in Carolina Beach for a year, starting in October 2019, WTVD reported.
In October 2023, he was hired as a detention officer with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina, leaving his post once again in July 2024, the outlet said.
Gillum returned “as a non-sworn” employee in Chapel Hill in 2024 — before leaving to work as an Orange County deputy between January and September 2025, according to the outlet and town officials.
The wannabe mass shooter was most recently remembered as Officer of the Month in June 2025 for his “attention to detail” helping to solve a gas station robbery, according to a social media postverified by the outlet.
“Gillum located a single latent fingerprint on a coffee cup used by the robber just before committing the crime,” the post said.
“This print allowed us to identify and arrest the suspect when security footage did not capture usable images. Well done, Deputy Gillum!”
It’s unclear why he resigned from so many positions.
Gillum was arrested as a fugitive from justice and will be extradited to Louisiana to face charges.
With Post wires
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