On December 12, 2025, a mid-afternoon 911 call drew Wilmington police to a home in the 600 block of Bladen Street, where Ebony Boles, 54, was found inside with a gunshot wound. She was rushed by EMS to Novant Medical Center, but the injury proved fatal, turning an ordinary Friday into the start of a homicide investigation that unfolded over the course of a single tense evening.
Investigators said the shooting happened around 3:30 p.m., and that the person they were looking for had already left the area before officers arrived. Detectives from the Wilmington Police Department’s Criminal Investigation Division and Gun Crimes Unit worked alongside agents with the State Bureau of Investigation as the search widened beyond the neighborhood, tracking leads into the night until they located the suspect hours later on Castle Street.
Police identified the suspect as her husband, Michael Tyrone Loyde. Officers spotted him around 10:30 p.m. and took him into custody after he attempted to flee again, bringing the initial manhunt to an end and moving the case from the street to the courtroom.
Loyde was charged with murder and held without bond. At his first court appearance on December 15, he was appointed a capital defender—an indication the case was being treated as a potential capital prosecution—while investigators continued to piece together what happened inside the Bladen Street home in the hours leading up to the shooting.
As the legal process began, arrangements for Boles’s farewell took shape as well, with a funeral service listed for December 29 at First Baptist Missionary Church in Wilmington—one more public marker of a life abruptly cut short, and a family left to carry the weight of what happened behind their front door.
