In the five years before police say Gwendolyn White shot two attorneys outside a downtown Raleigh courthouse last month, at least four permanent restraining orders were taken out against her, a pattern of harassment that followed White wherever she moved.

White, 57, is charged with two counts of attempted murder in the May 22 shooting of Mary Katherine Harris and Jeffrey Whitley outside the Wake County Courthouse. She’s accused of opening fire on the two Fox Rothschild attorneys in an alleyway as they left a hearing in White’s case against the Rolesville Police Department. Harris and Whitley were representing the police department.

White, who has filed dozens of lawsuits, fraudulent criminal charges and no-contact orders against businesses and people since 1997, believed Rolesville police were part of a conspiracy with the Ku Klux Klan to murder her and her late mother, The News & Observer previously reported. White’s mother died at 90 years old last year in a nursing home after suffering from dementia and other medical issues, but White claimed she’d been burned in an acid attack at the hands of state agents.

No evidence has ever been found to support White’s accusations, according to hundreds of court filings reviewed by The N&O. At least two Wake County judges entered gatekeeper orders against her in the past decade after finding she had a pattern of filing frivolous lawsuits, criminal charges and no-contact orders against innocent people.

And last month’s shooting was far from White’s first hint of violence, court documents show.

First battle with neighbors

White had been in her new home in Rolesville’s Carlton Pointe neighborhood less than two years when the trouble started.

“Ms. White has made our lives miserable since she moved in, and is causing my children and my wife to be afraid of our neighbor shooting us,” her next-door neighbor wrote in a March 2021 request for a no-contact order.

The N&O is not naming the neighbors at their request because of safety concerns, including threats they’ve received since White’s arrest went viral on social media.

White moved into the $350,000 home with her mother Dec. 31, 2019, court documents state. By March of 2021, she’d become convinced her neighbors were racists determined to destroy her life.

From the spring of 2021 to April 2022, when a judge entered a gatekeeper order against her, White tried to file no-contact orders on her neighbors — a married couple with three children — at least four times. She wrote in court filings and in repeated social media posts that the couple had broken into her home more than 40 times, damaged her car and lawn, and were trying to poison her.

The couple, frightened for their family’s safety after White repeatedly asked if they wanted to get shot, successfully sought a restraining order against White in March 2021, court records show. But that didn’t stop White, who continued posting about them online and making extraordinary claims in court filings.

The couple were especially disturbed by a February 2022 Facebook post where White used an allegory of rats eating poisoned cheese in what appeared to be a thinly veiled threat against their family. The story used descriptions for the rats that matched attributes of the family next door, like the “blonde frosted hair” of the wife rat and the lactose allergy of their youngest child.

“The husband now has to bury 4 of 6 family members, 6 close friends family’s [sic] and their 6 children,” White wrote in the post. “The entire White rat-family died, except one their youngest daughter [sic].”

That same month, a judge sanctioned White for violating the terms of her no-contact order and ordered she reimburse her neighbors for the $1,000 they’d spent on an attorney. But White never paid the money; after the gatekeeper order in April 2022, which was intended to prevent her from filing frivolous complaints, a judge ordered her to obtain a mental health evaluation and move out of the house by mid-June, court records show.

However, that move would only lead to a new set of lawsuits.

‘I don’t feel safe for my family’

Yesica Villanueva, her wife and two small children had their first brush with White about a month after moving into their Northeast Raleigh home.

On a windy night in the spring of 2023, White knocked on the Villanuevas’ door, asking them to pick up some trash she said had blown into her yard. The couple complied, but found White didn’t want to reciprocate when her trash blew into their yard the next night.

“We did the same thing — knocked on her door and said, ‘Hey, your trash is blowing into our yard,’” Villanueva recounted. “She starts yelling … So I go outside and I’m like, ‘Hey, there’s no need for this. We don’t need to be yelling at each other.’”

In response, White bent over and exposed her naked buttocks, telling Villanueva to “kiss [her] Black [expletive],” according to Villanueva’s retelling and court documents.

The problems only escalated from there, ranging from White taking down Villanueva’s son’s birdhouse to allegedly telling the Villanuevas their kids would be safe if anyone shot into their townhouse because the bullets wouldn’t penetrate the walls.

“She would just come outside and record us while we’re just going out, taking our kids to school, walking our dog,” Villanueva recalled. “We would walk outside, and because it was a townhome community, as soon as we walk outside, she turned her sprinkler on from inside of her house so that … we can’t go out of our front door.”

White developed the same beliefs she’d held about her Rolesville neighbors, accusing the Villanuevas of planting bugs in her home, being racist and trying to poison White and her mother. She called the women homophobic slurs and wrote in a court filing that “[t]hese 2 gay ladies are crazy as hell,” court records show.

The courts became involved that summer, when Villanueva’s wife filed a request for a no-contact order against White, court records show. That sparked a back-and-forth legal battle, with White filing for retaliatory no-contact orders against the Villanuevas and attempting to file bogus stalking charges against the women.

“Defendant make [sic] comments about owning guns + obtaining a conceal-to-carry,” Villanueva’s wife wrote in her request for a no-contact order. “I don’t feel safe for my family based on her erratic behavior + mental capacity.”

Court documents show how the grievances piled up as summer turned to fall. White got Villanueva’s car towed. White had Villanueva’s wife arrested by a rookie Raleigh Police Department officer who confused a hearing notice with an arrest warrant. The Villanuevas spent nearly $5,000 in attorney’s fees alone, which White ultimately had to repay them, according to an order signed by Judge Margaret Eagles.

Even as judges held White in contempt of court, she continued her legal battles against the Villanuevas; Judge Louis B. Meyer III would deem her incompetent to stand trial in May 2024, after she was charged with stalking the couple. Judge Eagles entered a gatekeeper order against White in December 2023, her second in less than two years.

The Villanuevas reached their breaking point when the conflict was clearly impacting their children.

“Our attorneys were taking care of everything, but what really became an issue was that our son was scared to go outside,” Villanueva said. “This 4-year-old kid, he’s like, ‘Oh, she’s outside. She’s outside. I’m so scared.’”

At that point, they felt they had no choice but to sublease their home and move. They’d been there less than a year.

“When we got a call from our attorney about what had happened downtown before it hit the news, [my wife] was shaking, and she was like, ‘Oh my god, that could have been us,’” Villanueva said. “Now we’re more careful about choosing our neighbors.”

In the Spotlight designates ongoing topics of high interest that are driven by The News & Observer’s focus on accountability reporting.

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Woman who shot NC attorneys stalked neighbors, made threats online, orders show

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