On the morning of September 18th, 2022, a group of ATV riders on a remote trail off Buckhorn Road in Orange County, North Carolina, found something that would fracture two families and confound a jury for years to come: the bodies of two teenagers, shot dead on a path most people didn't know existed.
Devin Clark was eighteen. Lyric Woods was fourteen—a freshman, a member of the Chickasaw Nation community, a girl with her whole life still unwritten. By the time their bodies were discovered on that quiet stretch of farmland thirty miles northwest of Durham, the person investigators believed responsible was already gone.
The Manhunt and the Charges
Seventeen-year-old Issiah Ross fled North Carolina after the killings. For nearly a month, authorities tracked his movements across state lines. In October 2022, they caught up with him in Delaware.
Ross was seventeen at the time of the shootings, but the severity of the charges—double murder—meant he would face trial as an adult. Prosecutors pushed for first-degree murder on both counts. The maximum penalty: life without parole.
The case crawled through the legal system. More than three years passed before Ross finally stood trial in Orange County in January 2026. By then, the families had been waiting longer for answers than Lyric Woods had been in high school.
The Defense That Changed Everything
Murder trials rarely feature the defendant on the witness stand. The risks are enormous—every word becomes evidence, every inconsistency ammunition for prosecutors. But Issiah Ross took the stand as the defense's only witness.
What he told the jury upended the prosecution's entire theory.
Ross admitted he killed Devin Clark. But he claimed it was self-defense. According to his testimony, he had stepped away from the car to give Clark and Woods privacy. Then he heard gunshots from the direction of the vehicle.
When Ross returned, he said, Lyric Woods was already dead—and Devin Clark was holding the weapon. Ross testified that Clark turned the gun on him, and in the struggle that followed, Ross grabbed the firearm and fired.
The implication was extraordinary: Ross was asking twelve jurors to believe that one victim had murdered the other, and that the only living witness—Ross himself—had acted in self-preservation.
A Dead Man Who Cannot Testify
The prosecution attacked this narrative as a convenient fiction. Devin Clark wasn't alive to contradict Ross's account. He couldn't explain his actions that night, couldn't offer his version of events, couldn't defend himself against an accusation of murder from beyond the grave.
But the defense had planted something prosecutors couldn't fully uproot: reasonable doubt. In a murder trial, doubt is the difference between conviction and acquittal. The question was where that doubt would land.
The jury deliberated. When they returned, their verdict was fractured.
Guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Devin Clark. Not first-degree—which would have required proof of premeditation—but second-degree, meaning the jury found Ross killed Clark intentionally, with malice, but without planning it in advance.
On the charge of murdering Lyric Woods, the jury deadlocked. They could not reach a unanimous decision.
Judge Stephanie Reese declared a mistrial on that count. The fourteen-year-old's death remained, legally speaking, unresolved.
What a Split Verdict Means
Split verdicts aren't system failures. They're the system working exactly as designed. Juries aren't required to reach consensus on every charge, and when they can't, it often signals that the evidence was genuinely ambiguous.
But for Lyric Woods' family, legal design offers little comfort. Three years of waiting produced half an answer. The prospect of a second trial now looms—same evidence, same arguments, a new group of twelve strangers trying to decide what the first jury couldn't.
Prosecutors have signaled they intend to retry the Woods murder charge in March 2026. If they proceed, Ross could face additional decades in prison. Or another jury could deadlock. Or they could acquit entirely.
The Sentence and What Remains
Judge Reese sentenced Ross to the maximum for second-degree murder: twenty to twenty-five years in prison. He was seventeen when he killed Devin Clark. He'll be eligible for release sometime in his late thirties or early forties.
Devin Clark's family has a verdict. Issiah Ross will serve time for what he did to their son. But even that conviction exists alongside an uncomfortable asterisk: the jury rejected Ross's self-defense claim for Clark's death while simultaneously failing to reject his account of what happened to Lyric.
The case has prompted legislative action. Proposed bills called "Lyric and Devin's Law" have emerged in North Carolina, aimed at addressing issues the case exposed—particularly around protecting minors. Criminal cases, even unresolved ones, often reshape the laws that failed to prevent them.
For now, one family waits while the legal system determines whether to run through the entire process again. The remote ATV trail off Buckhorn Road has long since returned to its usual quiet. The two teenagers who went there on September 18th, 2022, never came home. And the full truth of what happened that night may remain buried with them.
