This week, Publisher Bill Bowman yields this space to 

Jeff Thompson.

The people of Cumberland County and North Carolina lost a remarkable public servant with the untimely death this month of retired Fayetteville District Attorney Ed Grannis. I say untimely because by all accounts he should still be with us. As many of us had, Ed had what ordinarily is a routine medical procedure, an angioplasty. But, something happened and infection set in. His kidneys and liver shut down and he contracted pneumonia. 

Those of us who knew Grannis had high opinions of him. As a journalist, my impression was based not on his prowess as a lawyer, but on his qualities as a public servant. I will not use the word politician to describe him even though he served in elective office for 35 years.  Grannis was an example to others in public life.  He was not politically ambitious. He truly possessed a rare sense of duty.

Edward W. Grannis Jr. was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army after successfully completing ROTC at Wake Forest. He served for two years in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and then at Fort Bragg as a basic training company commander. Upon completion of his service obligation Grannis decided to go to work in the District Attorney’s office. He hadn’t planned on being a prosecutor. He told the State Bar Journal in 2014 that he didn’t go to law school to become an attorney. He said he spent seven years at Wake Forest University to get a good education.

Grannis was a part of Cumberland County’s modern evolution. He fought for and about the law. He did battle with county commissioners in a fight to get a new and larger jail built to house inmates local lawmen were arresting in a determined fight against crime. He modernized the administration of the local court system. He fought in Raleigh for increased funding for our courts. In his three and a half decades as district attorney of the 12th prosecutorial district, the office grew from a handful of lawyers to one of the largest and most respected in the state with more than two dozen assistant district attorneys, many of whom went on to have distinguished careers as judges and state legislators. 

I knew Ed from the day he took office but got to know him better during one of the highest profile crimes he prosecuted — that of mass murderer Kenneth French. On Ed’s birthday, August 6, of 1993, the soldier fired a barrage of bullets into Luigi’s Italian Restaurant and then entered the busy eatery continuing to fire. Before he was shot and wounded by police, French shot twelve people, killing four of them including Pete and Ethel Parrous, Luigi’s owners. 

French’s trial was held six months later in Superior Court in Wilmington. Then-Judge Coy Brewer presided and Grannis took the lead in prosecuting French. I learned then that he was not a zealot, but a pragmatist. He sought the death penalty but after a month of testimony, the jury convicted French and decided on life in prison without parole. North Carolina law provides that the judge must sentence a convicted murderer in accordance with the decision of the jury. Ed said he was disillusioned early in his career that the death penalty is what he called an “inexact system.”  In that interview with the State Bar Journal, Grannis noted that by the 1990s our state had moved beyond capital punishment, although it’s still on the books.

Theodore Roosevelt said “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly.”  I’ll bet I speak for many when I extend prayers to Grannis’ family and express the thanks of a grateful community for 

his service.