Man convicted of terrorizing Black family renting NC home is going to prison, feds say
A 35-year-old man accused of terrorizing a Black family in Eastern North Carolina will spend the next two-plus years behind bars, according to federal prosecutors.
Douglas Matthew Gurkins was sentenced to 28 months in prison with three years of supervised release on Monday after he pleaded guilty to criminal interference with the Fair Housing Act, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina announced in a news release.
The FHA makes it illegal for someone to threaten or intimidate a person’s housing rights based on their race.
“There is no way to undo the damage Gurkins did to these families with his hateful, repulsive, and violent behavior,” Robert R. Wells, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in North Carolina, said in the release. “The FBI hopes today’s prison sentence can provide them some sense of comfort. No one should ever be targeted or threatened because of the color of their skin, especially in their own homes.”
Gurkins is accused of driving to the house of a woman and her four children in December 2014 and yelling racial slurs, telling the family “they did not belong in their home” and threatening to shoot them and any other Black person who stepped foot on their property.
“After making this threat, the defendant brandished a metal rod in a threatening manner,” the news release states. “The family moved out of the neighborhood a few days after this incident.”
Gurkins subsequently harassed at least two other Black families living in the same Greenville neighborhood over the next four years, prosecutors said.
Gurkins was charged with one count of interfering with the Fair Housing Act in July, court filings show. He pleaded guilty in August.
But N.C. Department of Public Safety records and civil court filings indicate this was not an isolated incident.
Gurkins was charged with communicating threats on four different occasions in Pitt and Beaufort counties between 2014 and 2017. He was also charged in 2017 with stalking and trespassing, both misdemeanors, according to DPS records. He did not serve time in prison for those charges.
A retired Black couple also sued Gurkins and several others in civil court last year, saying he threatened, intimidated and insulted them after moving into the other halfof a duplex they rented in 2017, a complaint says.
According to civil court filings, Gurkin repeatedly referred to the couple using racial slurs and threatened to “beat her Black a--” when speaking to the wife. He reportedly yelled these comments at the couple when they were outside their home and through the walls of the duplex.
The couple subsequently took out a no-contact order against Gurkins.
The case is ongoing in the Eastern District of North Carolina.
This story was originally published November 24, 2020 at 1:04 PM with the headline "Man convicted of terrorizing Black family renting NC home is going to prison, feds say."
