WRAL.com29%
Family looking for answers after 3 people found dead inside Rocky Mount home 22%
By Flynn Snyder26% Megan Cloherty15% WRAL News45%
8/4/2026, 5:34:38 AM
Topics: Crime, Death Investigation
BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Availability Heuristic, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 16.7% saturation with 57 hits. Analysis detected 427 faulty-reasoning hits from 342 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 28.5% and a BS Rank of 22% (23,907 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 78.20% of the article peer group.
Rocky Mount police are investigating the deaths of three people found dead inside a home on King Charles Court on Monday.
Among the deceased: Tracey Swann, Kenny Swann and 20-year-old Mahala Scurlock, who Tracey had adopted, family members told WRAL.
Officers found their bodies at 10:45 Monday morning, Rocky Mount police said in a statement.
Police said that, while they haven’t determined a cause of death, there appears to be no safety threat to surrounding residents.
"The North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has been contacted and will notify the Rocky Mount Police Department regarding the official cause of death,” the police statement said.
Elizabeth Scurlock, Tracey and Kenneth's niece, told WRAL that she’s still struggling to process the deaths.
“They would give you the clothes off their back if they could.
They meant — they mean the world to us,” Scurlock said.
Krista Crisp, Tracey Swann’s daughter, told WRAL that her mother’s electricity had recently been turned off — a detail that, she says, could have played a role in the deaths.
Rocky Mount, which has dealt with billing issues for months, recently started charging customers late fees and shutting off power for some customers who had unpaid bills.
Crisp said the family's utility bill was over $2,000 and her mom was the only one working.
She said her mother tried to make partial payments, but said the city would only accept the full amount.
Crisp suspected over the weekend that Tracey Swann might be in trouble.
First, Swann failed to show up to a planned family shopping outing on Saturday.
Then on Sunday, she didn’t answer the front door when a family member came knocking.
When a family member returned to the Swanns’ residence again Monday, she told Crisp: "I smell death."
Police forced their way into the home to find the Swanns and Scurlock dead, as well as three dogs.
The city of Rocky Mount did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Speakers
2speakers48%attributed speech179writer words
Selected voice
86%flagged-word coverageKrista Crisp
124 attributed words76% of attributed speech51% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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