Carolina county elections chair charged with spiking granddaughters’ ice cream with cocaine – weirdly, he also reported the same to police

A 66-year-old man in Wilmington, North Carolina, was charged with lacing his granddaughters’ ice cream with narcotics, and the more details about the incident reveal themselves, the more confusing the story gets.

The charged man is James Edwin Yokeley Jr., and he’s the chairman of the Surry County Board of Elections. Yokeley is reportedly a registered Republican — which certainly in these divided times is a noteworthy detail online that affects the scope of how people receive stories. Yokeley’s granddaughters’ ice cream was found to be laced with two pills that later tested positive for MDMA and Cocaine.

The girls did not go on to ingest the pills, as they were spotted before they ate them. However, lately there have been situations where a man in Oklahoma was charged with sexually assaulting his 11-year-old stepdaughter and got her pregnant. So understandably, on X, people were outraged.

One user mentioned how in Texas lacing a drink with drugs in a woman’s is not in itself a crime and mirrored this case to point out how it’s getting out of hand. A lot of users could not get past the fact that Yokeley is a Republican and immediately started speculating about Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. But one hawkeyed user noted how odd it was that Yokeley Jr. was the one who flagged down the police to report the pills in the ice cream.

In Texas, we do not prosecute crimes involving men putting drugs in a woman’s drink without her consent. It doesn’t matter if it’s mifepristone or horse tranquilizer. We just don’t.

— Amy Bresnen (@amy_bresnen) August 28, 2025

Did anyone read the article? He planted the pills but flagged down police to let them know that he found pills in the ice cream so was this a long con that went bad?

— hyp (@mediamoll) August 28, 2025

That’s where the story gets complex. According to the local Wilmington publication Port City Daily, Yokeley was at the Sheetz gas station at 2517 Shipyard Blvd with his two juvenile granddaughters. The details from there get unclear — who actually found the pills is still under investigation. But what is confirmed by the police report is that Yokeley himself flagged down the police on patrol and reported that the pills were in the ice cream. Later investigations into the videotape at the location revealed that Yokeley was also the individual who placed the pills on the Dairy Queen ice cream.

What’s unclear is why Yokeley would place the pills, or at least why he would then proceed to report himself for doing the same. The pills have since been sent to a state lab for further testing. MDMA — colloquially known as “molly” — is long believed to be a drug that also acts as an aphrodisiac, which just makes this situation all the more disturbing.

As the investigations are ongoing, speculations are not dying down. As the X post reveals, some users are already speculating whether this was a long con gone wrong. That’s obviously unsubstantiated, but the multiple culture wars about mundane things — about how the Cracker Barrel logo should look like and who exactly should get the credit for it — are starting to take a toll on people.

The battle is no longer about how to improve society. It’s about who gets to “win.” So even a situation where a man being caught on videotape trying to drug his granddaughters might be just a plot to jumpstart another culture war. After all, the Trump administration can always turn this into an immigration problem like they do just about everything else.