NEWS

New DA follows calling to prosecute

Jon Ostendorff

FRANKLIN – Ashley Welch remembers professors in law school discouraging her from becoming a prosecutor.

The pay was low, they said. Most of her classmates would clear six figures in their first jobs. She’d be lucky to break $30,000. Her income would skew the law school’s ranking, which is based on starting salaries, they said.

She didn’t care.

She had wanted to be a prosecutor since she was a teenager, so she got a job doing that back home in Hendersonville as quick as she could.

It was never about the money.

“I think that’s the difference,” she said. “Sometimes, you find people who become prosecutors to get the trial experience for a few years. You get people who become prosecutors because they don’t really know what else they want to do, they sort of fall into it. And then you get people who do it because that was their calling. I’m one of those people.”

On Thursday, Welch was sworn in as the elected district attorney in the same Macon County courtroom where she started as an assistant a decade ago.

She is the first woman to hold the office in the judicial district that covers the state’s seven westernmost counties. She is one of 10 female district attorneys out of North Carolina’s 44.

And, at 36, she’s one of the youngest elected prosecutors in the state.

Welch, a Republican, won the office in landslide in November over Democrat Jim Moore, an assistant prosecutor who was nearly 20 years older.

He campaigned on experience. She campaigned on integrity.

She didn’t spend much time considering that she might become the first woman to hold the office before her run. Like the money, it wasn’t the point.

Her parents, Ty and Jackie Hornsby, raised her and her sister to know they could do anything a man could — and better.

The hotly contested race brought issues of gender and age to the forefront. They are aspects she has since thought much about.

“It’s just part of it,” she said. “You really sort of have to fight a little bit harder to prove to people that you’re tough and can do it and you are just as qualified. And that was a harder path to get here. But, to be honest, it prepared me better for it than if it had just been easy.”

Hard-fought win

Welch graduated from East Henderson High School.

She went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then to William & Mary Law School in Virginia.

She worked for District Attorney Jeff Hunt in Henderson County before taking a job with District Attorney Michael Bonfoey in the 30th Judicial District in 2005.

She made Franklin her home. She married attorney Brian Welch, who works for the Macon County Sheriff’s Office.

She honed her skills as a trial prosecutor with cases ranging from minor crimes to murder and rape.

When Bonfoey decided to retire, Welch decided it was time to make a move for the top job.

Moore, also a longtime assistant prosecutor, was her only competition. The two had tried cases together, making the campaign season tense for the office.

Moore seemed to have an edge heading into the year. He had 27 years of experience. The district had voted mostly for Democrats in the past when it came to the DA’s office.

But, as lawyer and Republican supporter Orville Coward Jr. predicted nearly a year before the vote, times were changing in the district. The GOP was poised for a win in that race.

Welch didn’t take the conservative shift for granted. She targeted the counties and communities where she knew she was weak.

She put 15,000 miles on her car in a year. She visited civic groups and fire stations. She mined the calendar in the Smoky Mountain News for events to attend. She would go to anything other than a church event or a religious service.

She took the three far western Republican counties by big margins. That was something the GOP had expected, Coward said.

But even in historically Democratic Haywood and Jackson counties, she won.

Coward credits the win in those places to Welch’s hard work in the campaign and her record in the courtroom. She spent 11 days outside the early voting site in Haywood.

He also said the end of straight-party ticket voting helped because voters had to make a choice.

“In Ashley’s race, they voted for Ashley,” he said.

Her gender came up some during the campaign.

“They would call me a little girl,” Welch said. “It made me mad. And then it escalated to little lady, which I didn’t find nearly as offensive. And I just sort of went along with it.”

She realized that, sometimes, the description was not meant to be offensive. She was the age of the children, and grandchildren, of some of the voters in her district.

Other times, she said, it was meant to offend. And it wouldn’t have come up had she been a man, she said.

She ended up winning every county. She got 60 percent of the vote.

“It was astounding,” she said. “I’m still a little overwhelmed by it.”

Coward says voters will be pleased.

“I believe she is a departure from the past and that she will be a very distinguished district attorney and that her real hallmark will be that she will be extremely honest, always,” he said this week.

Changes to the office

Welch is still getting used to being a public figure.

Her face was on 18 billboards across the district at one point.

She gets stopped on the street in Waynesville while walking to get coffee. The nurses at the hospital recognized her when she visited recently.

She also didn’t realize how much her family would be in the public eye.

“That’s going to take a little while to get use to,”she said.

Welch becomes the chief executive of basically the largest law firm in the seven western counties.

The District Attorney’s Office employs 25 people, including staff. Three of the 10 assistant prosecutors are women. The rest are men and nearly all older than Welch.

For the first time in her career, Welch will be making the salary — $120,000 a year — that most of her classmates from William & Mary made in their first jobs.

She started out making $28,500 as an assistant with Hunt’s office.

The money will help pay off her student loans, she said.

Welch has hired four new prosecutors. Two assistants from her office have left for better pay in other districts.

She is dividing assistants between Superior and District courts instead of the all-purpose county prosecutor system used in the past.

She said the new system sends a signal to judges, and the public, that assistant prosecutors are accountable from start-to-finish for their cases. Victims like it better because they deal with the same prosecutors, she said.

Welch faces a backlog of murder cases. In Swain County alone, about dozen homicide cases are pending, including one that has eight defendants.

Welch has hired experienced assistants, with ties to the western part of the state, to help.

Chris Hess is coming from Buncombe County, where he worked for District Attorney Ron Moore.

Eric Bellas is coming from the district attorney’s office in Hickory.

Both are highly recommended, she said.

A long-range plan

Welch says she’ll keep the public informed as much as she can about the work her office does.

There is a lot prosecutors can’t talk about. They don’t normally discuss the details of ongoing cases. Ethical rules bound them to confidentiality, most of the time.

Her plan is to be as honest and open as the rules allow.

“I don’t plan on doing this for four years and stepping down unless the voting public votes me out,” she said. “I am going to do everything I can to show them they made the right decision when they put me in office.”

Welch plans to continue to try some cases. She’s also going to call the docket sometimes, even in traffic court.

Some district attorneys act only as executives.

“I think the public needs to see the elected DA trying cases,” she said. “People elected me not just to sit in the office. They need to see me. I’m going to be in court.”

She said the move comes with some political risk, but it also will keep her grounded and will help her hold assistants accountable.

Her message to other young women in the mountains is one of hard work.

“They can do anything they put their minds to,” she said. “Sometimes, people think that you’ve got to go to a fancy private school or you have time come from a big city. I went to East High, and grew up over in Hendersonville, and here I am. And I’m young to be able to do it.”