A nurse says an off-duty cop held her at gunpoint and threatened to ‘shoot her in the face,’ but the DA called the incident a ‘simple mistake’

Kandice Robinson says she was working an overnight nursing shift on Nov. 23, 2018, when she pulled into a Mint Hill driveway to turn her car around while searching for a client’s address. An elderly woman, later identified as the grandmother of off-duty Matthews Police Officer Nick Helms, had given her directions and agreed to let her use the driveway, according to Atlanta Black Star.

As she turned around, Robinson says Helms and his wife, Samantha, came outside with guns drawn. “Don’t move! We’re going to shoot you in the head!” Robinson says Helms told her. “We’re going to shoot you in the face!” Robinson, a Black woman, says she told the couple she was a nurse looking for a patient. She was wearing scrubs at the time, but says neither of them believed her. Helms responded, “I don’t believe you,” Robinson says, and kept his gun raised.

Robinson says his wife went inside to speak with the grandmother, came back out, and told him to lower the weapon, but that he refused and moved it even closer to her window. The couple released her about a quarter hour later, Robinson says. Mint Hill police told local media in 2018 that officers had responded to a report of a suspicious vehicle and spoken with all three of them; Helms and his wife denied the allegations, and no arrests were made. Authorities didn’t release his name at the time, since he hadn’t been charged with anything.

A former colleague is now pushing to reopen it

Tyler Ross, a Black former Matthews police officer let go in January 2025, wants the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office to take another look at whether Helms committed a felony. Ross says he faced his own racial harassment on the force, including a training officer who told him his “Black a– deserves a military beatdown,” and that he was passed over for lateral promotions and DWI training that went to newly hired white officers instead.

The department has said Ross was fired over “policy violations and officer safety” tied to a trespassing call; Ross disputes that account and has filed a complaint with the EEOC, which is investigating. Ross says an assistant district attorney told him prosecutors couldn’t prove intent, which is why Helms was never charged, and that Mint Hill police never presented the case to prosecutors at all.

Robinson says a DA’s office representative separately described the incident to her as a “simple mistake.” “Well, simple mistake comes ends with apology,” she said. Neither Helms nor the district attorney’s office has publicly responded to Ross’s renewed request for accountability. North Carolina’s kidnapping statute, G.S. § 14-39, makes it a felony to unlawfully confine, restrain or move someone without consent for a specific listed purpose, including terrorizing the victim.

Courts applying the statute have held that prosecutors don’t need to prove the victim was actually terrorized, only that terrorizing them was the intent behind the confinement. That’s a narrower reading of “intent” than a simple yes-or-no question of whether someone meant to restrain another person, and it may be the distinction underlying the DA’s account, though neither side’s characterization has been independently confirmed.

North Carolina has no statute of limitations on felony charges, so the passage of time alone wouldn’t bar prosecution now. Whether Helms could also face civil liability turns on a separate legal question: whether he was acting “under color of law” despite being off duty. Courts have generally held that an off-duty officer crosses into that territory when they invoke their police authority, such as identifying themselves as an officer or asserting police powers during the encounter, rather than acting as a private citizen.

Nothing in the account here establishes whether Helms identified himself as an officer during the stop itself, which would likely matter to that analysis.