North Carolina man receives 3 life sentences for ‘Fort Bragg Cartel’ murders

The man convicted in the drug-related killings of a special operations soldier and an Army veteran whose bodies were dumped in a Fort Bragg training area will spend the rest of his life in federal prison. 

Kenneth Maurice Quick Jr., 26, was sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus an additional 83 years in prison for the 2020 murders, the Justice Department announced Aug. 26. 

“This cold‑blooded murderer will never see the light of day again,” Ellis Boyle, a U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, said in a statement. 

A federal jury convicted Quick in May of eight counts stemming from the double homicide, including first-degree murder, drug conspiracy, firearms offenses and obstruction of justice, the statement said. 

Army officials identified the victims after their deaths as Master Sgt. William “Billy” Lavigne III, 37, and Army veteran Timothy Dumas Sr., 44.

The men were found dead Dec. 2, 2020, in a wooded training area on the North Carolina base. Their deaths drew widespread media attention and later became the subject of the book “The Fort Bragg Cartel.” 

Lavigne, an active-duty Delta Force soldier, had served 19 years in the Army, including 12 years with Special Forces and special operations units, according to an Army statement issued in 2020.

Dumas was a retired Army chief warrant officer 3 who deployed four times to Afghanistan and was working as a civilian employee supporting Special Forces units at Fort Bragg at the time of his death.

Evidence presented during Quick’s trial tied the killings to a drug deal involving the three men.

Leading up to their deaths, Lavigne had purchased drugs from Dumas and intended to resell them to Quick, who never planned to pay for them, according to prosecutors.

Quick instead shot Lavigne five times in the back at a “trap house” in Laurinburg, N.C., prosecutors said. 

Dumas, attempting to avoid the same fate, helped Quick transport Lavigne’s body to the Fort Bragg training area. But after Dumas’ truck became stuck in the terrain, Quick fatally shot Dumas in the head and back before fleeing. 

Quick and his co-conspirators returned the next day to recover Dumas’s truck, which they ransacked and burned in a neighboring county, the Justice Department said. 

Lavigne and Dumas were already under investigation on suspicion of drug use and trafficking on the installation, an unidentified defense official told CBS in 2020.

The March 2025 murder of a potential witness in the case remained under investigation as of May, Kim Overton, a spokesperson for the district’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, told Stars and Stripes at the time. 

Quick had “passed names through jail calls” of potential witnesses against him, including one who was later killed by a fellow gang member, Overton and the Justice Department said.

After Quick’s mother informed him of the witness’s death, he responded, “Damn, you don’t know how happy that makes me feel,” the Justice Department said in May.

“Understand this, if you commit depraved violence on federal property: we will hunt you down, we will prosecute you, and we will lock you away for a very long time … You get life for taking a life,” Boyle said. 

Lavigne had also been investigated in the shooting death of his best friend and Green Beret, Sgt. 1st Class Mark Leshikar, in 2018. The death was ruled a justifiable homicide after Lavigne claimed Leshikar had come at him with a screwdriver.