Search warrants detail fatal Morrisville shooting outside Park West Village center

Search warrants say a routine dispute outside Ruckus Pizza, Pasta & Spirits at 1101 Market Center Drive in Park West Village turned deadly when Zachary David Horn pressed his body against John Willis Fraizer III and then stepped toward him. Investigators say Fraizer responded by firing five shots from a .22 caliber revolver, setting off a chaotic scene in the middle of one of Morrisville’s busiest retail corridors.

Horn, 45, ran into the neighboring Crumbl Cookies after the shooting. Witnesses there tried to help him before he was taken to Duke Hospital in Durham, where he later died. Fraizer, 55, went inside Ruckus after the shots were fired, and bystanders and staff disarmed him and held him until police arrived. He now faces first-degree murder and discharging a firearm within city limits, and a judge has declined to set bond.

The sequence in the warrants shows how fast an argument outside a shopping center can spill into a life-or-death emergency for people who were not involved in the dispute. Park West Village is built for dinner, shopping and evening traffic, with families, restaurant customers and employees moving between storefronts. Instead, the area became an active crime scene, with one man dead and another restrained inside a restaurant until officers reached him.

The warrants also add background about the relationship between Fraizer and the restaurant. Employees and witnesses described him as a frequent customer who drank there and had shown aggressive behavior before, including using racial slurs inside the business. That history does not answer every question about what happened outside Ruckus, but it gives prosecutors a clearer picture of the setting and the tensions surrounding the men before the shooting.

Court records reported in coverage also say Fraizer previously pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon in 1995. Combined with the witness accounts, the new details underline how quickly a public argument in a high-traffic commercial center can escalate, and how vulnerable nearby customers and workers can be when violence breaks out in a place that usually feels ordinary. The case has already become one more reminder in Wake County that a shopping district can turn from routine to deadly in seconds.