“As a child, I was difficult and hard-headed and driven to do what I wanted to do. But I never got into trouble. I wasn’t a bad kid,” recalled Mangum, the third child of a father in the insurance industry and a mother who was a schoolteacher.

He found direction in teamwork as a pitcher for the Broughton High School baseball team. “To this day, some of my closest friends are from my high school baseball team.”

Teamwork has been a theme in his career. “Being on the bench can be terribly isolating,” said Mangum. “I loved being on the bench, but you’re out there on your own to make a decision. The judges, in a lot of ways, support each other, but at the end of the day, it’s you making that decision, and you’re not making a team decision.”

After graduating from UNC School of Law, Mangum started his career in the Wake County District Attorney’s Office where he worked under DA Colon Willoughby for 10 years.

In 2008, Gov. Mike Easley appointed Mangum as a Wake County district judge. He returned to the DA’s Office in 2014 as acting DA when Willoughby retired. “One of the reasons why I wanted to go back to the DA’s Office was because I liked the team idea of working on something together,” said Mangum.

 “To use a sports analogy, as a judge, you’re the umpire or referee. Then I go back [to the DA’s office], and all of a sudden, I’m the head coach again. It was fantastic to be able to do that. I loved every minute of it; having said that, it was incredibly stressful.”

Stressful indeed. Four days after Mangum was sworn in, Frank Janssen, the father of a Wake County assistant DA was kidnapped. During the next five intense days, Mangum worked on the case with a team of local, state and federal law enforcement.

“This case was ongoing, and the outcome was not going to be who goes to prison; it was going to be, is this man going to live?” recalled Mangum. “The happiest time professionally I can remember is when we got the word from the FBI in Atlanta that he was alive and safe. That was awesome.”

Kelvin Melton was arrested and charged with kidnapping and a slew of related charges in what was determined to be a gang-related crime. In 2016, he was sentenced to life plus 84 months consecutive imprisonment.

After Mangum’s nine-month assignment as acting DA ended, he returned to the bench. He considered running for DA, but North Carolina election laws precluded him from running for office while serving as a judge. Mangum opted to stay at the courthouse.