LaKesha Womack Wins N.C. House Seat While Facing Rental Car Felony

Democrat LaKesha Womack flipped North Carolina's 14th Congressional District on Nov. 3, beating Republican Rep. Tim Moore 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent. A week after that, on Nov. 10, she is scheduled to stand in a Mecklenburg County District Court on a pending felony charge accusing her of failing to return a rental car in 2019.

Her margin was 6,415 votes out of more than 288,000 cast, according to unofficial results from the North Carolina State Board of Elections. Moore, the former longtime speaker of the North Carolina House, first won the seat in 2024 and was widely expected to keep it.

The charge is a Class H felony. Womack has not been convicted of anything, and the case was still open on election night.

A $20,000 Corolla and a summons from January 2020

Womack is charged under North Carolina General Statute 14-167 with willfully failing to return a hired motor vehicle worth more than $4,000. The summons alleges she rented a 2019 Toyota Corolla from Budget Car Rental and did not return it by the Oct. 23, 2019, deadline.

The summons puts the value of the car at $20,000, which is what pushes the case from a misdemeanor into felony territory.

A criminal summons was issued in January 2020 and came back unserved the next month. It then sat. It was reissued and finally served on Oct. 11, 2026, almost seven years after the car was due. The rental company recovered the vehicle, according to court records.

Deputies showed up at her campaign event on a Sunday

Polk County Sheriff's Office deputies served the 49-year-old candidate on Sunday, Oct. 11, at one of her own campaign events, WBTV in Charlotte reported. The criminal summons they handed her dated back to 2020.

Why nobody served it for six and a half years was not immediately clear. The station reported that the original summons was issued in January 2020 and simply was not served until this year.

WSOC obtained body camera footage of the moment deputies served her. The timing put the paperwork in her hands less than a month before voters went to the polls, and days before early voting opened.

What Womack has actually said about the car

She has admitted the car went back late. Before she was served, she told supporters on Facebook that she had been homeless with her then 10-year-old son. "At one point, I had a rental car, and I did not return the rental car on time," she said. "And I did not know that they had filed a case against me for this because, again, I was homeless, so I had nowhere to receive mail."

After the summons landed, she stopped answering specifics. WSOC government reporter Joe Bruno asked her directly: "What happened to the rental car?"

"I can't talk about that because it is an ongoing legal case," Womack said. "But I will say that if it were something much more serious, then I probably would have been served and charged much quicker than a week before early voting started."

Her campaign put out a longer written statement in late October aimed mostly at Moore's ads. "Accountability, however, must be grounded in facts, fairness, and due process rather than speculation or sensationalism," it said. She also took a shot at her opponent's day job: "As an attorney himself, Congressman Moore knows full well that any ongoing legal matter should be addressed through the appropriate legal process."

She called the schedule itself a problem. "That's what makes the timing of my court date (one full week after Election Day) especially frustrating," the statement read. Womack has also said she went through a medical emergency that put her in intensive care around that period, and described herself as a single mother living with Type 1 diabetes. She has not laid out how those events connect to the unreturned Corolla. She has a lawyer and is not commenting further.

$59,000 against $2.1 million

Womack had never run for office before. She raised about $59,000 through Oct. 14. Moore raised about $2.1 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings. He spent part of it on ads built around the charge.

Two years earlier he had carried the same district by roughly 16 points. The 14th covers Burke, Cleveland, Gaston and Rutherford counties and parts of Mecklenburg and Polk, taking in Gastonia, Shelby, Morganton and a slice of far south Charlotte.

She was not alone on Nov. 3. More than 40 Democrats flipped Republican-held House seats in the midterms. Hers was one of the cheaper ones.

Defense lawyers think the charge falls apart

Two Charlotte defense attorneys with no role in the case told reporters that a conviction is unlikely. Their reasoning, as reported, came down to two things: charging a felony by summons rather than by arrest is unusual, and proving that somebody willfully kept a car years after the fact is hard.

The outcomes they floated were a dismissal or a reduction to a misdemeanor. The attorneys spoke to The Charlotte Observer.

If the felony stuck, the exposure is real. Sentencing for a Class H felony in North Carolina runs from four months to more than three years, though a defendant with no prior record can receive probation.

A conviction would not take her seat, but it could freeze her

Nothing about a felony conviction automatically kicks a member out of the House. Removing a sitting member takes a two-thirds vote of the full chamber, the same bar that applied when the House expelled George Santos.

What a conviction would trigger is House Rule 23, clause 10. Under that rule, a member convicted of a crime that can carry two or more years in prison is expected to stop voting on the floor and stop taking part in committee business until the presumption of innocence is restored or the member is reelected. Class H felonies in North Carolina can exceed two years.

The same rule asks a member formally charged with such a crime to give up committee seats and any party leadership post until the charge is dismissed or reduced below a felony. If the new House keeps the rule and her case is still open on Jan. 3, that would apply from her first day.

The other question Republicans raised

The car was not the only line of attack. Questions came up during the race about where Womack actually lives after she bought a home outside the district while the voting address she listed inside the district was being offered for rent.

That one goes nowhere legally. The U.S. Constitution only requires that a House candidate live in the state, not in the district. Plenty of members of Congress live outside the lines they represent.

Nov. 10, then Jan. 3

The court appearance is set for Tuesday, Nov. 10, in Charlotte. Her swearing-in is set for Jan. 3, 2027. Whether the case changes anything about that day is not known.

Voters in the 14th had the charge in front of them for the last three weeks of the campaign, complete with television ads paid for by Friends of Tim Moore. They elected her anyway, by 6,415 votes.

The felony case follows her into office. A 2019 Toyota Corolla and a piece of paper that sat unserved from February 2020 until a Sunday afternoon in Polk County now belong to the congressional record of a first-term member of the United States House.