The deaths of a Delta Force soldier and an Army veteran found shot in the woods of a North Carolina base have for years garnered speculation that culminated in the form of a bestselling book about drugs, violence and the culture of U.S. special forces troops at Fort Bragg.
Nearly six years later, a man has been sentenced to three life terms plus 83 years in federal prison after a jury convicted him of their murders. Kenneth Maurice Quick, Jr., 26, was convicted in May of eight federal charges from the December 2020 killings of Master Sgt. William “Billy” Lavigne, 37, and former soldier Timothy Dumas, 44.
The Justice Department said Quick shot Lavigne five times in the back during a cocaine deal that turned violent before forcing Dumas to drive to a remote area on Fort Bragg to dump the soldier’s bullet-riddled body. When Dumas’ truck got stuck in the sand, prosecutors said Quick fired his gun at the back of the veteran’s head, killing him. The following day, Quick returned and recovered the truck, drove it to another road and set it on fire, according to a Justice Department statement released in late August.
The department referred to the men only as “WL” and “TD” when announcing Quick’s sentence, but Lavigne and Dumas have long been publicly identified and their deaths feature in Seth Harp’s “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” which probes a series of deaths, allegations of drug trafficking and criminal impunity surrounding the Army post and its elite special operations community.
In the book, published in August 2025, Harp detailed suspicions among people close to Lavigne and Dumas that Quick — whom he described as a low-level drug dealer — was solely responsible for the killings, given Lavigne’s extensive training.
Lavigne had been in the Army for 19 years and was assigned to the U.S. Special Operations Command at the time of his death. He graduated from the Special Forces Qualification Course in 2007 and deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was no stranger to a criminal investigation, however, having shot and killed Sgt. 1st Class Mark Leshikar, 33, a Green Beret described as Lavigne’s friend, in a 2018 altercation that was ruled a justifiable homicide, according to the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office.
“William shot and killed my brother in front of my niece,” Leshikar’s sister, Nicole Rick, previously told Military Times. “William had called me a month after my brother died to tell me his story, and he said my brother came at him with a screwdriver but there was not one found near my brother’s body or in the house.”
Later that year, he also faced felony charges of harboring an escapee and maintaining a vehicle or dwelling place to manufacture a controlled substance. Those charges were later dropped.
Dumas was a property accounting technician in the Army from 1996 to 2016 and deployed to Afghanistan multiple times.
Both men were set to face additional, unrelated charges in the months following their deaths. Lavigne was to appear in Cumberland County District Court for a hit-and-run charge and Dumas was to appear in Forsyth County District Court, charged with breaking and entering, communicating threats and impersonating a law enforcement officer.
Eve Sampson is a reporter and former Army officer. She has covered conflict across the world, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
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