Seaga Gilliard


Brandon Hill


April Lynn Holland and Dwayne Garvey


Man accused of shooting dead pregnant mother and her boyfriend 'Googled penalties for murder and fetal homicide before arrest'

A North Carolina suspect charged with shooting to death a pregnant woman and her boyfriend at a Raleigh motel last month went online after the murders to look up the penalties for 'double homicide' and 'fetal homicide,' according to police.

Seaga Gillard, 28, is facing charges of first-degree murder in the December 2 slayings of April Lynn Holland, 22, and Dwayne Garvey, 28.

The couple were found fatally shot in the pre-dawn hours inside America's Best Valley Inn in the 3900 block of Arrow Drive in Raleigh.

Holland was four months pregnant with her fourth child, who could not be saved. She and Garvey are survived by two sons, ages one and two, and a three-year-old daughter.

According to a search warrant released by the police last week, and obtained by News & Observer, when detectives reviewed Gillard’s search history on his smartphone for December 2, they found entries in the Google search engine that included, 'how much can you face for double homicide nc'; 'fetal homicide state laws,' and '2 man wanted in raleigh nc.'

Gillard was arrested and charged a day after the double homicide, but his alleged accomplice, 29-year-old Brandon Hill, managed to flee to Florida.

Hill dyed his hair blonde in an apparent effort to elude the authorities but was eventually captured and extradited back to Raleigh on December 29 to face murder charges.

Gillard and Hill are being held in the Wake County jail without bail. If convicted of the first-degree murder counts, they could face the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Police in Raleigh said Holland and Garvey’s slayings were captured on surveillance inside the motel on the morning of December 2.

Officers who responded to the scene found Dwayne Garvey lying face down in a second-floor hallway with multiple gunshot wounds.

April Holland was found dead from a single gunshot wound inside room 220.

An investigation has uncovered that Seaga Gillard had communicated with either Holland or Garvey by phone just before the killings.

Garvey's brother and sister-in-law previously claimed that Holland knew Seaga Gillard from the time she was a teenager, but they would not comment on the exact nature of their relationship.

'Her past came back to haunt her,' Garvey's brother, Dwight, told the News & Observer last month.

Garvey, who was black, and Holland, who was white, met in 2011 and fell in love in defiance of both their families, who did not support the interracial relationship, according to Dwight Garvey’s wife, Ravien.

She added that her brother-in-law was ultimately killed defending the mother of his children and ‘the love of his life.’

According to Garvey’s family and Holland's sister, the couple had been struggling to make ends meet and had been living in motels, but their loved ones said that despite their financial woes, the pair were doting parents to their three children.

Seaga Gillard, a native of St Lucia, Virgin Islands, has an extensive past criminal record that included charges of armed robbery, kidnapping, forcible sexual offense and assault by strangulation stemming from an incident last October in which he allegedly raped a woman at gunpoint and then mugged her.

The victim told police the 28-year-old man tried to strangle her with a phone cord.

Federal records indicate that Seaga was convicted in 2007 in the Virgin Islands of domestic violence assault.

In 2011, then-22-year-old Seaga Gillard was arrested along with his younger brother, Kalid, for attempted murder related to a double shooting in Durham, North Carolina, but prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges against Seaga due to lack of evidence,

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