Lawsuit settled after mother exposed NC trooper’s lie in fatal Raleigh crash

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Tyrone Mason, 31, died after his car slammed into a concrete barrier on Capital Boulevard near Wake Forest Road in Raleigh the early hours of Oct. 7. A Highway Patrol trooper, after talking with his supervisor, did not immediately disclose that he had pursued Mason before the crash. Mason’s mother says she was told no officer chased her son before he died. What she learned on her own launched a state investigation into the officers’ behavior.

Nearly two years after a North Carolina State Highway Patrol trooper lied about his involvement in a fatal Raleigh crash, a settlement agreement will resolve one piece of a mother’s relentless quest for truth and accountability.

Tyrone Mason, 31, died after he wrecked his 2018 black Chevrolet Malibu on Capital Boulevard around 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2024.

Henrietta Mason suspected the trooper who had called in the crash had tried to pull her son over. Raleigh police and Highway Patrol officials told her that wasn’t the case.

But that didn’t stop Henrietta Mason.

She went from business to business looking for surveillance footage. She brought a witness to the Raleigh Police Department and sought help from the NAACP, internal affairs investigators and others.

But nobody listened until an attorney successfully fought for the video footage that proved the mother was right. After the release of the body-camera footage, Trooper Garrett Macario and his supervisor, Sgt. Matthew Morrison, were fired.

Henrietta Mason’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in North Carolina’s federal Eastern District against Macario. The lawsuit claimed that he failed to render aid to Tyrone Mason after the crash.

On July 29, U.S. District Court Judge James C. Dever approved a settlement agreement between the Mason family and Macario, who was represented by the N.C. Attorney General’s Office. State officials agreed to pay $200,000 to settle the case, according to a July 29 order approving the agreement.

Under state law, the Highway Patrol is responsible for making the payment, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office wrote in an email.

“Hopefully, the North Carolina Highway Patrol will create policy changes in remembrance of and in response to the Mason death, centering on changes to their high-speed chase policy, their investigatory policy, their transparency, and very fundamentally, not lying to the constituents they’re supposed to protect and serve,” said national civil rights attorney Bakari Sellers, one of the family’s attorneys.

Sellers and attorneys Ben Crump and Sean Cecil will receive $73,000 for fees and $12,091 for expenses, the court documents state. Tyrone Mason’s family will receive the rest, including nearly $105,000 that will be placed in a trust for an unnamed minor’s health and education.

Another payment to the Mason family could also be pending. A claim against the Raleigh Police Department is working its way through an administrative process, Sellers told The News & Observer this week. Mason didn’t respond to The News & Observer’s telephone messages.

The Highway Patrol didn’t respond to emails requesting a response.

Henrietta Mason’s questions began the morning her son died.

Raleigh police officers had come to her Durham home to tell her Tyrone was dead, she told The N&O last year. Later that morning, she called a number on a card they had left behind.

Who found her son? she asked.

A Highway Patrol trooper, she was told.

“Was the state trooper chasing him?” she remembers asking.

No, the officer said.

Henrietta Mason didn’t believe it.

She returned to Capital Boulevard, asking businesses whether they had surveillance footage from the night her son died.

In November 2024, she found James Jaime.

Jaime had been waiting for an Uber outside a Capital Boulevard bar the morning Tyrone Mason died. Jaime said he heard sirens, accelerating cars and then a crash. Henrietta Mason persuaded him to accompany her to Raleigh police headquarters, where he gave investigators a written statement.

“That’s a mom, bro. She deserves answers,” Jaime later told The N&O.

Still, Mason said, she couldn’t even get the trooper’s name.

She began contacting anyone she thought might listen, including Cecil, a Raleigh attorney who volunteered to help her obtain the video.

“To give you peace of mind as a mother, I’ll just help you out,” he told Henrietta Mason.

Initially, the Highway Patrol told Mason she could view the videos at its Blue Ridge Road office, she said. But as she drove there in December 2024, a Highway Patrol supervisor called to share that the trooper had admitted he tried to pull over her son that night.

Mason was too distraught to enter the office, so Cecil sought to allow her to watch it at home.

On Dec. 23, 2024, Mason emailed the State Bureau of Investigation outlining her concerns, and an assistant special agent asked her to come to the office right away.

The SBI reached out to Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman, who started gathering information for a criminal investigation.

By early January 2025, Freeman had reviewed the Highway Patrol and Raleigh police videos and started dismissing about 200 of the trooper and his supervisor’s traffic and other cases due to concerns about their credibility, she said then.

On Jan. 31, 2025, Mason watched the Highway Patrol video with her children in her living room.

“It was horrible,” she said.

In May 2025, at the request of The N&O and other media outlets, a Wake judge ordered Raleigh police and the Highway Patrol to release videos from Tyrone Mason’s crash investigation to the general public.

The videos showed Macario, parked at a gas station and turning on his lights to pursue Tyrone Mason as he sped down Capital Boulevard.

Macario chased Mason for about one mile before he turned off his lights.

Seconds later, Macario rounded a bend and found Mason had crossed the other lane of traffic and smashed into a pillar, with bits and pieces of the Malibu scattered along the side of the road.

Macario walked around the car and called his supervisor, Sgt. Morrison. He told Morrison he had turned on his police lights to pull Mason over for speeding, but turned them off when Mason sped away because he believed a chase would be unsafe, according to body-worn camera footage.

“When I came around the corner, … he’d already wrecked,” Macario told Morrison.

“Please tell me you’re (expletive) joking,” Morrison responded.

The sergeant told Macario to keep the crash to himself.

“I wouldn’t mention anything to them about you trying to stop him. Just say, ‘Hey man, I drove up on this’ and leave it at that,” Morrison said.

Initially, Macario did do as his supervisor had asked.

“This is a little area I work, so, when I came up on it, I saw all the smoke and heard all the cars hitting the debris,” he said.

Afterward, Freeman released a report on the SBI investigation. Freeman didn’t press charges against Macario or Morrison, though she expressed concerns about their actions following the wreck.

The report said that when Macario tried to stop Mason for speeding, he accelerated to about 100 mph. Macario then turned off his blue lights and slowed down.

At the same time, Mason lost control of his car and crashed. Macario reported the crash to emergency communications and then called his supervisor, the report said.

“Notably, Trooper Macario did not attempt to make contact or provide care to Mr. Mason,” Freeman’s report states.

Freeman said her investigation indicated that while Macario initially denied involvement in the crash, he later told one officer at the scene the truth and a Raleigh police captain who called Macario later.

The same day that Freeman released her report on the trooper investigation, Henrietta Mason filed a lawsuit on behalf of her son’s estate.

Macario and Morrison were fired about a month later.

This story was originally published August 19, 2026 at 5:30 AM with the headline “Lawsuit settled after mother exposed NC trooper’s lie in fatal Raleigh crash.”