A Republican official in North Carolina was charged with felony child abuse after he allegedly attempted to drug his two granddaughters with cocaine and MDMA.
The chairman of the Surry County Board of Elections, James Edwin Yokeley Jr., told police earlier this month that he had discovered “two hard objects” in ice cream he had bought from a local Dairy Queen—but video evidence collected during the investigation suggested otherwise.
Yokeley was reportedly caught on tape placing the pills in the girls’ ice cream himself, the Wilmington Police Department said in a press release Wednesday. Neither child ingested the drug-laced pills.
The local Republican chair was arrested and is currently held on a $100,000 bail. Along with the child abuse charges, Yokeley faces two counts of contaminating food or drink with a controlled substance, and felony possession of schedule 1 narcotics.
Yokeley only recently came into power in the artsy beach town: the 66-year-old was appointed in June by State Auditor Dave Boliek, though the state official no longer appears to be one of his supporters.. In an interview with WRAL News, Boliek called the matter “very disturbing.”
Yokeley was selected in part because of his previous experience on the board. He had previously run for a seat on the Surry County Board of Education in 2022, winning 26.69 percent of the vote in the Republican primary. Boliek emphasized that “nothing” had appeared in the election officials’ background check “that would suggest this at all.”
Yokeley resigned via letter Thursday afternoon, though he insisted that he had been “falsely accused.”
“Based on the truth and facts, | remain prayerfully confident that I will be exonerated of all accusations levied against me,” Yokeley wrote.
In a statement to the News & Observer, Boliek said that the resignation would allow the board to “move forward with the process of appointing a replacement.”
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