After murder acquittal, Graham man pleads guilty in jail escape case

Tyshawn Esamuel Wiley was back in Alamance County Superior Court on Monday morning and pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy to escape from jail and feloniously aiding and abetting another defendant’s escape from the Alamance County jail.

The plea came only days after an Alamance County jury acquitted the 20-year-old Graham man of two first-degree murder counts in the August 25, 2022 shooting deaths of Melvin Wiley and Malik Martin, both 16, at Graham Village Apartments along East Hanover Road in Graham. The escape charges were filed in October 2024 while Wiley was being held pending trial on the homicide counts.

Wiley received credit for 584 days already served in the Alamance County jail, and the court disposition appeared unlikely to add meaningful time to what he had already spent locked up. That places the focus less on punishment length than on what happened inside the county detention system while a high-profile murder case was moving through the courts.

The other defendant in the escape matter was Jasiah James Miller, who court files say had been charged with felony discharge of a firearm into an occupied dwelling. The public record summarized in the case does not explain how the escape happened, leaving the mechanics of the alleged assistance outside view. North Carolina law separately makes it unlawful to aid a person known to have escaped custody and addresses prison breach and escape from county or municipal confinement facilities.

The case also pulls attention back to the Alamance County Detention Center itself, a 240-bed facility built in 2006 and opened in 2007. Alamance County Sheriff Terry S. Johnson, who has served since 2002, is responsible for detention and court security, making any jail escape allegation a direct test of the county’s custody procedures and oversight.

Wiley’s murder case had already drawn unusual attention because it began in juvenile court before moving to superior court. A grand jury indicted him as a 17-year-old, and a judge denied a defense request to return the case to juvenile court. Records also show Wiley was born in Alamance County on August 5, 2005, and family members identified Melvin Wiley as his cousin.

The double homicide reached beyond the courtroom because it involved two teenage victims from the Graham area, one of them killed on the night of his 16th birthday after celebrating hours earlier. With the murder trial resolved and the jail-escape case now closed by plea, the larger question for Alamance County is how a case tied to custody inside its own detention center unfolded at all.