On the night of September 23, 2018, a 911 dispatcher in Gaston County, North Carolina received a call from a man who described his wife’s symptoms with the kind of precision that comes from years of medical training. He said she was not breathing. He said she was blue. He gave the address clearly, stayed on the line, and remained composed throughout. His name was Joshua Hunsucker. He was a flight paramedic for Atrium Health’s Med Center Air.
He had caused every symptom himself.
Emergency crews arrived at the house in Mount Holly and rushed 32-year-old Stacy Robinson Hunsucker to the hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival. Because Stacy had spent the previous five years living with a mysterious heart condition that had never been fully explained, and because she had received a pacemaker at 29, the doctors who examined her that night accepted the explanation without question. No autopsy was ordered. Her death was recorded as cardiac failure and the case was closed before the week was out.
The devoted husband
Those who worked with Joshua Hunsucker at Atrium Health’s Med Center Air would not have found it surprising that he stayed composed in a crisis. He had been doing it for years. As a flight paramedic, he responded to the kind of emergencies that require calm judgment and precise medical knowledge at altitude, situations where hesitation kills. His supervisors regarded him as technically sharp and dependable. His colleagues trusted him in the air. He was, by every professional account, a man who understood how the human body fails and knew exactly what to do about it.
At home in Mount Holly, that steadiness looked like devotion. Joshua and Stacy had been together since high school, the kind of couple whose longevity made other people feel that commitment was possible. They married in 2010 and settled into a new house together. Stacy worked at a preschool in Charlotte, where the parents of her students remembered her warmth and her easy patience with children.
Friends described her as happy, present, and deeply invested in her family. The couple had two daughters: Piper, born in 2013, and Willow, born in November 2014. Their community saw a family with everything in order.
However, as investigators would eventually establish, Joshua Hunsucker had been poisoning his wife from almost the very beginning of that life.
Her health deteriorated
The medical problems began in February 2013, not long after Piper was born. Stacy started suffering episodes of dangerously low heart rate and blood pressure that appeared without warning and without explanation. She had breathing difficulties that sent her to the emergency room more than once. Specialists ran test after test and found nothing that could account for what was happening in a woman her age and physical condition. The most reasonable explanation anyone could offer was a post-pregnancy complication, the kind that occasionally affects women whose bodies struggle to recover after childbirth.
Because Joshua worked in medicine, he became her primary caregiver at home. He understood her medications. He tracked her symptoms. He was always the first to notice when an episode was beginning, and always the one who called for help when it escalated. Their community saw a paramedic husband doing everything right by a sick wife, and that was exactly what he needed them to see.
In July 2013, a fire tore through the Hunsucker home and destroyed most of the family’s belongings. A family friend named Suzanne Steinbroner started a GoFundMe campaign to help cover the rebuilding and Stacy’s growing medical costs. The community gave generously. Nobody had any reason to question the picture.
After Willow’s birth in November 2014, the episodes worsened dramatically. Stacy was placed in intensive care for several days. In January 2015, she was admitted again, and shortly after being settled into her hospital room, she went into full cardiac arrest. Her heart stopped. Doctors placed her on a ventilator and worked to stabilize her. The following month, they reached a decision that stunned everyone around her. Stacy Hunsucker, 29 years old, would need a pacemaker. Her cardiologist would later note it was almost unheard of in an active, physically healthy woman her age.
From that point forward, every new crisis had a label. Every hospitalization confirmed the same story: Stacy had a serious heart condition and her body was failing. Sickeningly, her body was doing exactly what Joshua needed it to do.
She died. He spent.
When Joshua called 911 on the night of September 23, 2018, he was already on his fourth version of where he had been when Stacy collapsed. To the dispatcher, he had stepped outside to check the cars because of recent break-ins in the neighborhood. He told one friend he had gone for a walk to burn off some energy. He told another he had been outside cutting wood for craft projects. He told Stacy’s mother, Susie Robinson, that he had been sitting at the kitchen table on his laptop with his back to the room, and had simply turned around to find Stacy slumped on the couch.
Four different versions of the same event. Not one consistent with the others.
After Stacy was pronounced dead, Joshua refused to allow a coroner to examine her body. He told officials he did not want her cut up. Because Stacy had registered as an organ donor through the Lifeshare Donor Center, hospital staff had already preserved a vial of her blood before releasing the body. Joshua had her cremated within 48 hours of her death, eliminating any possibility of further physical examination. In that same window, he filed claims on two life insurance policies: one worth $50,000 and another worth $200,000, naming himself as sole beneficiary on both.
He did not arrange Stacy’s funeral. Her parents, Susie and John Robinson, organized and paid for it themselves.
Before long, Joshua paid off the mortgage on the family home and purchased a $100,000 boat. He began taking vacations with a woman investigators believe he had been seeing before Stacy died. Within six months of the funeral, that woman had moved into the house where Stacy had raised her daughters. Co-workers at Atrium Health told investigators they had never once seen Joshua grieve. He appeared entirely unaffected by his wife’s death. He had moved on, one colleague recalled, as though he had been expecting it.
The vial Stacy left behind
Nine months after her daughter’s death, in May 2019, Susie Robinson contacted the North Carolina Department of Insurance and filed a formal complaint accusing Joshua of insurance fraud. She had no forensic evidence. She had five years of watching Stacy suffer from a condition that had never made sense, a son-in-law who had moved on before the funeral was paid for, and the certainty that something was wrong.
That complaint reopened everything.
Investigators obtained the preserved blood vial and sent it for testing. The initial toxicology screen came back negative. Rather than closing the inquiry, they requested expanded testing for substances that standard panels are not built to detect. What the laboratory returned changed the direction of the case entirely.
Stacy’s blood contained tetrahydrozoline, the active compound in over-the-counter eye drops like Visine, at concentrations between 30 and 40 times the therapeutic level. Applied to the eyes or nose as directed, tetrahydrozoline is safe for everyday use. Swallowed repeatedly over time, it suppresses heart rate and drops blood pressure in ways that are clinically indistinguishable from severe cardiac disease. In sufficient doses it causes coma. Larger doses kill. Every symptom Stacy had presented since February 2013 aligned precisely: her cardiac arrests, her pacemaker at 29, her years of unexplained crises managed at home by a husband who knew exactly what was in her drinks.
By that point, two of Joshua’s former co-workers had already told investigators, independently of one another, that before Stacy’s death Joshua had made an unprompted remark: if he ever wanted to kill someone, he would use Visine. Investigators also established that in August 2018, just weeks before Stacy died, a South Carolina nurse named Lana Sue Clayton had been arrested for fatally poisoning her husband with tetrahydrozoline, in a case that had dominated regional news coverage throughout that month. Clayton lived approximately 30 miles from Mount Holly. Stacy Hunsucker died on September 23, 2018.
In December 2019, Joshua Hunsucker was arrested at his home and charged with first-degree murder, felony insurance fraud, and obtaining property under false pretenses. In July 2020, Stacy’s official cause of death was changed from cardiac failure to homicide.
He still wasn’t done
The murder charge did not slow Joshua Hunsucker down. It gave him new targets.
In November 2019, weeks before his arrest, Joshua had been on duty aboard an Atrium Health medical helicopter when a fire broke out mid-flight. The pilot made an emergency landing at a car dealership. Nobody was injured. Atrium Health fired Joshua the same day. Investigators later concluded he had set the fire deliberately, and he was charged with arson in March 2021.
A judge set bail at $1.5 million on the murder charge. Five days later, on Christmas Eve 2019, Joshua posted bail and walked out. He turned his attention to Stacy’s parents almost immediately. According to court documents, he photographed and filmed Susie and John Robinson at Piper’s lacrosse practices, made obscene gestures at them in public, drove past their home, followed them in his vehicle, and sat in the parking lot of their church during Sunday services. He sent them a package demanding they drop the case against him. His daughters were present during several of these confrontations. He made no attempt to conceal any of it.
In February 2023, Joshua filed a police report claiming he had been kidnapped along Mountain Island Highway in Mount Holly. He told officers he had stopped to change a tire when he was attacked, pistol-whipped, zip-tied, and injected with an unknown substance. He named John Robinson, Stacy’s father, as his attacker. Police found no physical evidence to support any element of the account. Investigators concluded Joshua had staged the entire incident to redirect suspicion for Stacy’s murder onto her parents.
But Joshua still wasn’t done.
Weeks after staging the kidnapping, 10-year-old Piper Hunsucker was rushed to the hospital. Doctors found her heart rate dangerously suppressed and her blood pressure far below normal for a child her age. She was barely conscious and experiencing brief episodes of lost awareness. Her symptoms were the same ones her mother had lived with for five years before dying on that couch in 2018.
Toxicology results found tetrahydrozoline in Piper’s blood. The same compound. She also had O-desmethylvenlafaxine in her system, an adult antidepressant not approved for use in children. Investigators found a matching pill in Joshua’s truck.
What happened next was the detail that defined the case. While Piper was still being evaluated, Joshua told the medical staff that his daughter appeared to have been poisoned with eye drops. Prosecutors later pointed out that no one in that hospital could have reached that conclusion from the clinical information available at that stage of her treatment. There was only one person in that building who already knew what was in her blood.
Prosecutors alleged that Joshua had poisoned his own daughter to frame Stacy’s parents, intending to have them criminally charged and permanently removed from the children’s lives.
In July 2024, a judge formally ruled that Joshua had abused Piper and neglected both daughters. In August 2024, he was arrested on four counts of felony witness intimidation and four counts of misdemeanor obstruction of justice.
His bail was revoked. Custody of Piper and Willow was transferred to Joshua’s sister, while Susie and John Robinson continue to fight in court for the right to bring their granddaughters home. On April 6, 2026, Joshua Hunsucker appeared in Gaston Superior Court and pleaded not guilty to all charges. No trial date has been set.
Stacy Robinson Hunsucker went to work every day at a preschool in Charlotte and looked after other people’s children. She came home to Piper and Willow. She sat through cardiac arrests and specialist appointments and the fitting of a pacemaker before she was 30, and she trusted that the people around her were trying to help her get better.
Her friends raised money for her medical bills. Her community prayed for her. Not one of them knew. The only reason any of it was discovered is that Stacy had registered as an organ donor, and a single preserved vial of her blood survived everything Joshua Hunsucker did to bury it.
