A former police officer accused of planning a racially motivated mass shooting at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest) was quietly released from custody in June after a grand jury declined to indict him.
Christopher Gillum, 45, a former Chapel Hill police officer, had been held without bond following his dramatic April 22 arrest in Destin, Florida.
As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, authorities claimed he was heading to Louisiana to carry out a mass shooting targeting Black people at a large festival, widely understood to be the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest), which draws hundreds of thousands, and then commit “suicide by cop.”
A Louisiana grand jury in June declined to indict Gillum on a state “terrorizing” charge that carried a potential 15-year sentence. He was released shortly afterward.
His attorney, Dylan Utley, confirmed Gillum faces no charges in any other jurisdiction. The release went completely unreported until AP broke the story this week.
According to a statement from Lester Duhe, spokesperson for Republican Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, Gillum’s family has taken him “to a treatment facility out of the state.” He is not facing additional criminal charges.
Duhe pointed to major jurisdictional problems that sank the case: “The threat relayed to a family member actually occurred in North Carolina. The defendant never entered the State of Louisiana until after his arrest.”
Gillum had also been planning to travel to the Florida Keys during the same period he was allegedly supposed to head to New Orleans.
Louisiana’s terrorizing statute requires that “a crime of violence is imminent or in progress or that a circumstance dangerous to human life exists or is about to exist.” The grand jury decided the evidence did not meet that bar.
Here is where the story becomes even more alarming: North Carolina law enforcement officials told the AP that they did not know Gillum had been released.
North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s office said it has no plans to pursue the case. Florida authorities have not indicated any charges either. The FBI New Orleans office said charging decisions rested with prosecutors.
A former FBI executive who ran the agency’s active shooter program noted that thwarted plots often struggle to produce indictments because “it’s very difficult to convince a jury, or to convince a grand jury, that something might have happened.”
As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Gillum was arrested without incident at a Destin hotel after the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office, tipped off by federal authorities and using Flock license plate readers, located him. Deputies recovered a handgun and roughly 200 rounds of ammunition.
His family had reported him missing days earlier in North Carolina and told police he had a history of self-harm and had “expressed recent threats to harm ‘Black people.’” An arrest affidavit later detailed a phone call with a cousin in which Gillum allegedly spoke of going to New Orleans to “take care of business” and “kill a Black person,” while sobbing and describing his mental state. He also referenced a left-leaning Twitch streamer.
Gillum served as a sworn officer with the Chapel Hill Police Department from 2004 to 2019. He later worked as a Carolina Beach officer, an Orange County detention officer, a nonsworn Chapel Hill employee, and briefly as an Orange County deputy in 2025. He was even named Officer of the Month in June 2025 for helping solve a gas station robbery.
At the time of the arrest, national media and local officials treated the case as a near-catastrophe narrowly averted. Jazz Fest organizers thanked law enforcement. Louisiana State Police and the FBI confirmed they were involved. The story dominated coverage as a clear-cut example of a white former cop plotting racial violence.
Then the grand jury said no. And the story vanished.
Ad block users: Some site features may not work correctly while an ad blocker is enabled, because they break scripts and content this website depends on. If you can’t see comments below, for example, please disable your ad blocker.