Every so often — about 20 times a year — Western North Carolina’s social media networks flare up with impassioned pleas from friends and family members of a missing person, begging for any information that could help bring their loved one home. But the reasons for the disappearances, and the results of the investigations, are often as unique as the missing persons themselves.

A Jackson County man who pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $95,000 from an enterprise of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will spend 18 months in prison and pay nearly $200,000 in restitution, according to a sentence U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger handed down Feb. 18. 

The world watched with bated breath Jan. 6 as what is normally a perfunctory proceeding — the Senatorial certification of Electoral College results — turned violent. At the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., then-President Donald Trump was whipping attendees into a frenzy of anger over what he continues to claim was a stolen election, and as he spoke the roiling crowd made its raucous way to the U.S. Capitol a couple miles away.

Whittier resident Billy Hicks, 48, is being held without bond in the Jackson County Detention Center after his wife Danielle Hicks, 34, died as the result of a gunshot wound.

Quick police work coupled with private surveillance footage landed a Haywood County woman behind bars on several counts related to the partial burning of several American flags. 

Paul Snow pleaded guilty Tuesday in a Macon County courtroom to the Nov. 6, 2016, shooting deaths of his mother and sister, District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch said.

District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch said a key figure in Operation Jawbreaker, a sweep two years ago of suspected local drug dealers acting in concert on a two-state level, was arrested Tuesday and charged with harboring a fugitive.

A Waynesville woman must serve in prison a minimum of six months to a maximum of 17 months for stealing a Lake Junaluska security vehicle earlier this summer, District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch said.

After a routine surgery, Haywood County native Clayton Suggs ended up hooked on opioids until on the first day alone in his new apartment after a year of sobriety, his addiction eventually cost him his life.