Prosecutor’s retirement leaves Mecklenburg DA’s office with experience gap
It was summertime in the 1990s, and Charlotte was still the kind of place where local students made it into the paper when they made the dean’s list in Chapel Hill.
“Glenn Cole of Queens Road West” was one of 262 Mecklenburg students who did that in 1991. It was the first time Cole’s name appeared in The Charlotte Observer.
This is the 92nd.
Cole, who is a III, made the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office list as the third-most experienced prosecutor before retiring Friday. He joined the office in 1998 and tried some of Charlotte’s most well-known and difficult homicide cases for 18 years. He retired on the homicide team.
Cole spent nearly 30 years in total at the office, measuring time in trial calendars and jury verdicts. Prosecuting had become his passion even before he started law school, he said. But it also kept him from the early birth of his firstborn son and from trips with college friends, some of whom have since died.
A five-and-a-half-week trial on a cellphone shop shooting last summer “told me it was time to go,” he told the Observer in a recent interview.
Cole’s departure will be a “heavy burden” for younger prosecutors, said District Attorney Spencer Merriweather, who first interned at the office in 2003 — when Cole was a lead prosecutor on the homicide team.
Cole’s retirement comes after years of Merriweather’s pleas for more state-funded positions in his office. Iryna’s Law gave him 10 new positions when it passed last year, but an experience gap remains.
Of the 89 prosecutors in the district attorney’s office, 87 have less experience than Cole, according to employee records. Only eight join him in having more than 20 years of experience.
And 48 have worked less than five years in the DA’s office.
Cole, Merriweather said, is the sort of person “you hope to God has imparted on the youngest generation of prosecutors.”
Muse to foe
Cole worked about three years as a public defender after graduating, but he knew he wanted to be a prosecutor since his first time in a jury box in 1991 — the same year he first appeared in the Observer.
Inside the courtroom, one of Cole’s Sunday school teachers sat to his right, he remembered. She was the foreperson in charge of relaying the jury’s verdict to the judge. Norman Butler, then an assistant district attorney, was the prosecutor on the two-day trial, and he turned a low-level drug dealer case into something that felt “so important,” Cole said.
It solidified Cole’s plans to prosecute.
Years later, Cole rose up the ranks in the prosecutors’ office — and Butler became a defense attorney.
“We’ve gone at it big time,” Cole said, “but I’ve told him many times he inspired me, and it’s been an honor to match wits with him.”
A circular story
Cole recently represented the state against Devalos Perkins, a murder suspect and the subject of Observer project, “Purgatory.” Perkins, who was represented by Butler, found himself cycling through mental hospitals and jail beds for 11 years as he struggled with a pending murder charge case from 2012 and mental health issues. His long, winding time in the justice system ended with a guilty plea in December 2023.
Cole also handled the high-profile case of the man who shot a bystander during 2016 protests in uptown Charlotte. The man, Rayquan Borum, meant to shoot a police officer but instead killed Justin Carr.
And in 2000, with about two years of experience, Cole’s photo took up the front page of the Observer as it detailed a familiar issue:
Mecklenburg District Attorney’s Office was “stuck with too few prosecutors and too many crimes,” the paper read. The words framed a photo of Cole trailing a cart of papers.
“At the end of the day,” Cole said before packing up his office, “this keeps on going, whether you’re here or not.”
This story was originally published March 3, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
