Allen Thomas Jr. said the incident, at his Greenville residence, makes him question N.C.'s Castle Doctrine law.

Hoke County commissioner and Democratic N.C. lieutenant governor candidate Allen Thomas Jr. said he used a 12-gauge shotgun to scare away several people who had entered a townhome he rents in Greenville.

“It was a very, very intense situation,” Thomas said on Monday. “I was fearful. It took about 10 minutes for the police to arrive. And the last thing I wanted to do was have to use deadly force.”

The incident happened shortly before noon on Saturday in Pitt County. Thomas posted a video of the encounter to his Facebook page.

The video shows Thomas pointing the shotgun at his locked bedroom door and warning the men, who had been knocking, “If you open that door, there’s going to be some problems, man.”

No shots were fired and no one was injured.

Thomas said he saw the men run out the front door shortly before Greenville police arrived. He estimated there were four or five people in the townhome.

Thomas, who lives in Raeford, said he rents the second floor of a three-story townhome in the University Suites residential complex in Greenville. It's a place to stay when he visits Greenville for his job and to see his 9-year-old son who lives in the city. Allen Thomas Jr. of Raeford is not be confused with Allen M. Thomas, the former mayor of Greenville who now is running for Congress.

The townhome is designed for three people, with a bedroom on each floor, Thomas said. The first floor had another tenant, he said, and the third floor was vacant. Thomas went there on Saturday, he said, to pick up some things.

“When I got there, I quickly realized something wasn’t right, because I could hear people running upstairs,” Thomas said. "No one was supposed to be on the second or third floor."

Thomas went up to his bedroom and discovered it in disarray. There were scratches on the door frame, where someone used a knife to pop open the door, which Thomas kept locked. His dresser drawers and a suitcase had been opened and clothing thrown about the room, he said.

On top of that, “there was a stun gun on my dresser that someone had left behind,” he said.

Thomas said he could hear people moving about, so he locked himself in the bedroom. He called 911 to report there were intruders in his residence, he said, and he retrieved his shotgun from its hiding place in the room.

Then, Thomas said, he propped up his cell phone to record the situation — “just in case I had to use force, I wanted to make sure that it was no doubt, that I didn’t have any other choice,” he said.

Thomas posted just more than three minutes of video to his Facebook page. It shows a bedroom door next to a bureau. At the beginning, the barrel of a shotgun pokes into the frame briefly from the left.

At 22 seconds, someone rattles the door. Thomas points the weapon at it.

There’s knocking.

Someone says, “Hello?”

The gun barrel drops and there is a loud “click-clack-clack!”

Thomas had worked the pump-action on the gun to make a noise to warn the men he had a weapon.

There is another knock.

A man says several times that he wants to get his cell phone. Seconds go by and he knocks again and he asks if he can have his phone.

Finally, Thomas speaks.

“If you open that door, there’s going to be some problems, man,” he says “There’s going to be some problems if you open this door, bro.”

It sounds like there are at least two people talking outside the door. They continue to talk and Thomas talks over them.

“Keep moving," he says. "Keep moving."

Thomas tells the men that he’s recording and he again warns them.

“If you open this door," he says, "there’s going to be some problems.”

There are a few thumps, then silence.

The video next shows Thomas as he walks to the bureau, opens a drawer, retrieves a shotgun shell and loads it into the gun. The video ends a few seconds later.

Thomas said on Monday he looked out the bedroom window and saw the men leaving. He said he did not recognize any of them.

The police arrived shortly after the men left, Thomas said. Officers searched the home for evidence but did not find the cell phone.

North Carolina’s “Castle Doctrine” law gives people leeway to use deadly force against intruders without fear of being prosecuted.

The experience caused Thomas to question the Castle Doctrine, “which would have given me the ability to shoot through that door and kill someone unnecessarily.”

There was no need to shoot a man for just for asking for a phone from outside a door, Thomas said.

“I felt like I would have needed to know there was a threat,” he said, “and him coming through that door would have been the threat that I needed.”

He speculated the men were squatting in the townhome because he does not often stay there. He theorized that the first-floor tenant may have let them in.

But Thomas said he might have fired if the incident happened at his home in Raeford, because there would be no reasonable reason for anyone else to be in his residence.

Staff writer Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3512.