QUESTION: Did a suspect in the murder of a Wake County deputy recently pass through Alamance County’s jail?
ANSWER: Alamance County’s detention center was, indeed, a port of call for Arturo Marin-Soleto before his transfer to Raleigh, where he has since been indicted for the murder of slain Wake County sheriff’s deputy Ned Byrd.
The 29-year-old Apex resident was ultimately arrested in Burke County last Tuesday along with his younger brother Alder Alfonso Marin-Soleto – some four days after Byrd was found slain along a small country road in southern Wake County.
Rather than being immediately shuttled to Wake County, the elder Marin-Soleto apparently found himself in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has a longstanding agreement with Alamance County to lease bed space for its own detainees in Alamance County’s jail.
Byron Tucker, a spokesman for the office of Alamance County’s sheriff, conceded that it was as a prisoner of the federal agency that Marin-Soleto eventually wound up spending some time in the detention center in Graham.
“He was brought in on an ICE detainer,” the sheriff’s spokesman recalled in an interview Wednesday. “He came in some time [last] Tuesday night, and on Thursday, Wake County came in with a writ and took him to their detention center.”
Arturo Marin-Soleto was formally indicted for Byrd’s first degree murder on Thursday. Meanwhile, his 25-year-old brother, who was initially detained in Forsyth County, was indicted on an identical charge this Tuesday after he, too, was remanded to the custody of Wake County’s sheriff.
The two brothers are both accused of killing Byrd while he was out on a domestic call in southern Wake County on the evening of August 11. The body of the 48-year-old sheriff’s deputy was ultimately found near his parked SUV in the small hours of the following morning.
According to various news reports, Byrd’s canine partner, Sasha, was still inside the SUV, indicating that the deputy didn’t suspect enough of a danger to take the dog with him when he stepped out of the vehicle that night.
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