Mark Simmons hasn’t heard from his estranged boyfriend for nearly seven years. then, Nigel Max Edge He showed up at his work and falsely accused Simmons of stealing his identity.
They met and took classes at a community college and bonded during their time with the Marines in Iraq. The Simmons children once called Edge “Uncle Sean” – when his name was still Sean William Debevoise.
He told the judge that Simmons now felt afraid his old friend might retaliate against him.
“The defendant, Nigel Edge, is mentally unstable,” Simons said in a handwritten request for a protective order. “He always carries a gun with him, and takes high doses of medications that cause the defendant anxiety.”
That was in May, four months before authorities said Edge, a former Marine sniper, drove a motorboat into a crowded bar on the Cape Fear River in Southport, North Carolina. And he opened fire With an AR-style rifle, Three killed and Five injured.
Edge, 41, is charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder and has been in jail without bail since the Sept. 27 shooting at American Fish. A November hearing to determine next steps in the case was postponed to January.
The prosecution and Edge’s attorney did not respond to questions about why the case was postponed.
After the shooting, police recovered two handguns and a short-barreled rifle from Edge’s car and boat. In his house, they found two rifles and two other pistols, one of which was equipped with a silencer.
Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said North Carolina needs to join the 21 states that have “red flag laws,” which allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed a threat. But there was another legal option.
It is unclear whether anyone has petitioned the judge to involuntarily commit Edge to a psychiatric facility for evaluation because the records are not public. But anyone can have this job, not just family and close friends, says Mark F. Butts, associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Government.
“It seemed like he was separate from the people who would normally intervene,” Potts said.
Rachel Kroll feels like there’s a lot of blame on her shoulders, from his family to the government, and even herself.
“We have failed him as a whole,” she said.
Edge joined the Marines right out of high school, eventually rising to the elite Reconnaissance Sniper Corps. He was shot four times in 2006 during his second tour of duty in Iraq. The injuries led to his medical retirement in 2009.
When he returned from Iraq, much of his skull was missing and the insurgent bullet was still lodged in his brain, Marine Sgt. Sean DeBevoise – as he was known then – still had a firm grip on reality, Kroll said.
Kroll, who fell in love with the blond, blue-eyed wrestler when he was 14 when he came to her middle school in New York for a match, said his description of how he was injured in Iraq matched his comrades’ version of events. He loved his family and they loved him.
He then began patrolling the house with a rifle and sleeping with a loaded gun under his pillow. Separate bedrooms led to estrangement and eventually divorce.
When Kroll last saw him, 10 years ago on a Wrightsville Beach pier, “it was heartbreaking,” she said.
“He looked me straight in the face and told me a completely different story,” she said. “Basically, how did I hire the platoon to kill him, friendly fire. And did I know they buried him and urinated on him? And why would I do this? Then he asked me if I remembered we were sex trafficked when we were in high school, and he told me his parents had kidnapped him and not his parents.”
These are the stories he told in the book he self-published in 2020, “Picture in the Head: Betrayal of a Nation.” Three years later, he legally changed his name, saying there were “events in my life that I don’t understand” and that he “didn’t trust my family.”
Crowell said she didn’t hear from Edge again until May, when the man she nursed, bathed and fed filed a federal lawsuit against her, Simmons, his ex-girlfriend and former Marine from his first deployment to Iraq. She claimed they were all part of a “civil conspiracy” to sexually traffic him and kill him, or make him kill himself.
Edge filed lawsuit after lawsuit against friends, family, doctors, hospitals, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and even the church. Kroll and others said they believed authorities would provide him with the mental health care they felt he clearly needed.
“Plaintiff suffers from war injuries and suffers from delusions” and post-traumatic stress disorder, his mother, Sandra Debevoise, wrote in a legal response last December, after he sued her and her husband. “The VA needs to take care of him!!!”
The Department of Veterans Affairs declined to comment, citing medical privacy laws.
The legal onslaught got so bad that a Brunswick County judge moved to bar Edge from filing lawsuits without court approval.
Several people told the Associated Press they believe they lack standing to file a commitment petition because they are not close relatives.
The state Department of Health and Human Services warns that this is a “last resort.”
“Someone like that falls through the cracks,” Potts said.
In June, a judge ordered Edge to stay away from Simmons. Simmons told the AP that he did not want to talk about his former friend.
Behind bars, Edge has not been idle.
About three weeks after the shooting, he filed a handwritten notice of appeal after a federal judge dismissed his civil rights lawsuit against the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, several local law enforcement agencies and a charity that helps veterans.
“Recent events, ‘self-defense’ against ‘white supremacists’ is directly related to this case,” he wrote on lined notebook paper, without further context.