Only a handful of 2026 prospects have landed on the NC State basketball recruiting wishlist. A few of them, though, have been on that list for roughly a year.

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One of those longtime Wolfpack targets is Caldwell Academy (N.C.) versatile forward Cole Cloer, a 6-foot-6, 180-pound four-star who ranks No. 25 overall and No. 1 among North Carolina talents on the 247Sports 2026 Composite.

Not only did Kevin Keatts and his crew enter the Cole Cloer sweepstakes at a notably early juncture, but they were also clever enough to make the moment memorable by extending the offer on the coveted prep’s 16th birthday last September.

Evidently, as a result of that early offer gesture, paired with the Wolfpack’s persistent pursuit ever since and the 2023-24 NC State basketball team’s epic Final Four run, Cloer is now high on the program in Raleigh as a potential landing spot in a couple of years.

“I feel like [the Wolfpack’s Final Four run] tells a lot about their program, tells a lot about their guys,” Cloer recently explained to Zagsblog’s Sam Lance. “They kind of had a rough year leading up to it. They weren’t really expected to make it out of the ACC Tournament, but then they all stuck together. They trusted the process.

“I love Coach Keatts. Coach Keatts is a great guy, great coach who obviously brought them to the Final Four with a team people wouldn’t expect. And then the players seem like they love him, seems like he’s a great guy to hang out with. Coach [Brett] Nelson, who also just came in, great guy. Great guy to talk to. I talked to him a lot the past few weeks, and coach Nelson was an All-American. So, I mean, he’s a great coach.”

NC State isn’t the only Tobacco Road school in the race. No, Cloer’s double-digit offer sheet also includes Wake Forest and UNC.

As a sophomore at Orange High School in Hillsborough, N.C., before announcing his transfer to Caldwell Academy in Greensboro this summer, he visited the Wolfpack and Tar Heels.

Cloer, now eyeing official visits for his junior year, told Lance that he’s “definitely going to hit up NC State and Carolina again.”

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A former long-haul trucker awaiting trial in the 1992 murder of a North Carolina woman was charged in the suspected serial killings of three more women in California more than four decades ago, authorities said Thursday.

Warren Luther Alexander, 73, was charged with three counts of murder in connection with the 1977 strangulation deaths of Kimberly Fritz, 18; Velvet Sanchez, 31; and Lorraine Rodriguez, 21, law enforcement officials said at a news conference in Ventura County.

The women, all sex workers, were found dead in Port Hueneme, Oxnard and an unincorporated part of Ventura County, respectively, in May, September and December of that year, officials said.

Alexander, who is being held without bail at a Ventura County jail, was extradited earlier this week from North Carolina, where he was charged with murder two years ago in the strangulation death of Nona Cobb, Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko told reporters.

Cobb, 29, was found dead on an interstate northwest of Winston-Salem on July 7, 1992, according to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.

Her autopsy showed that she had been strangled, according to NBC affiliate WXII-TV of Winston-Salem.

Alexander was arrested in connection with the killing on March 15, 2022, in Diamondhead, Mississippi, the bureau said in a news release at the time.

Court records for Alexander’s case in North Carolina were unavailable Friday night and it isn’t clear if he has entered a plea or who is defending him.

Alexander is scheduled to be arraigned on the California charges on Aug. 21, court records show. A lawyer for Alexander did not respond to a request for comment Friday night.

Nasarenko said authorities in North Carolina used genetic genealogy, a technique that matches DNA obtained from crime scenes and elsewhere to profiles assembled by genetic testing companies, to link Alexander with Cobb’s killing.

After Alexander’s 2022 arrest, his DNA was uploaded to a nationwide law enforcement database and authorities in Ventura County were alerted to the case, Nasarenko said.

In 2006, investigators in the county had uploaded DNA preserved from the 1977 crime scenes to the same database, Nasarenko said, but it wasn’t until after Alexander’s arrest that his DNA entered the database and there was a match.

“Today marks the first crucial step toward achieving long-awaited justice,” the prosecutor said.

Alexander lived in Oxnard, roughly 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles, in the 1950s and 1960s while attending school, Nasarenko said. He returned there in the 1970s and worked as a long haul-trucker for the next three decades, the district attorney added.

Detectives who investigated the cases initially suspected the same suspect was responsible for the series of killings, he said, but they exhausted their leads and the cases went cold.

Authorities are now working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation through its Highway Serial Killings Initiative to help identify other potential victims linked to Alexander, Nasarenko said.

Authorities believe there may be others locally and in other states, he said.

“This is not in any way closed,” Nasarenko said.

CHICAGO (AP) — The dead woman who was found entangled in a baggage conveyor belt at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport was from North Carolina, authorities said Friday.

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the woman as 57-year-old Virginia Christine Vinton of Waxhaw, North Carolina. The office’s spokesperson, Natalia Derevyanny, said an autopsy was scheduled for Friday.

Firefighters responding to a 911 call found Vinton’s body entangled in the belt around 7:45 a.m. Thursday in a baggage room near a terminal that serves international flights.

According to police, surveillance footage shows Vinton enter the area around 2:27 a.m. Thursday, but it doesn’t show what happened to her.

The room where Vinton’s body was found is off limits to the public, and it’s unclear why she was in it, authorities said. A U.S. Department of Labor spokesman said she was not an airport employee.

Police declined to comment further on the matter.

There was no immediate response Friday to messages left at possible phone numbers listed as belonging to Vinton’s family