An NFL Player Wants the Son He Almost Killed
Rae Carruth’s name recently resurfaced in the news because of his release from prison. His story never made it into an episode of Forensic Files, but it should have.
It features elements of a Greek tragedy, including an NFL player (because professional athletes are the gods of modern-day mythology), a woman strong enough to defy him, and an innocent child born into a crucible.
Carruth would make a perfect anti-hero for an epic saga, except for one thing: He didn’t have an objective like glory on the battlefield or ruling the world.
He just wanted to save himself some cash.
After Carruth, a wide receiver for the Carolina Panthers, impregnated a real estate agent named Cherica Adams, he urged her to get an abortion. He was already paying $3,500 to $5,500 a month to support a son he had with girlfriend Michelle Wright in Sacramento five years earlier.
Adams, 24, decided to have her baby anyway.
Carruth, then 25, had a contract with the Panthers for $3.7 million over four years, which breaks down to $77,000 a month. A few thousand dollars more in child support every month wouldn’t have meant trading in his Expedition for a Fiesta or shopping at Jack’s 99 Cents Stores.
Nonetheless, Carruth, who had made a couple of minor bad investments in his young life, decided to intercept any new demand for funds.
He enlisted some hitmen.
Then, on November 16, 1999, he arranged for an outing to the movies with Cherica Adams that involved her car following his on the way to her home.
On Rea Road in North Charlotte, Carruth blocked her black BMW with his SUV so the killers could ambush her via a drive-by shooting.
She sustained three gunshot wounds to her back and one to her neck but managed to call 911, explain what happened, and say that she thought Rae Carruth was responsible.
It’s hard to listen to the recording. She sounds so sweet at a time when she was in excruciating pain (every third word out of my mouth would have been an obscenity) and needed help fast.
Doctors at Carolinas Medical Center delivered Adams’ son by emergency Caesarian section.
The baby, named Chancellor Lee, was premature and had cerebral palsy. His mother lapsed into a coma.
Meanwhile, investigators had tracked down the men in the rented Nissan Maxima used in the shooting. Two of them immediately gave up Carruth as the mastermind behind the plan.
Police arrested Carruth in connection with the shooting, and he made bail.
After Adams died of organ failure on December 14, 1999, Carruth fled. The police found him hiding inside the trunk of a friend’s car in a Tennessee motel parking lot. He had $3,900 in cash with him and a container he’d used to relieve himself in the vehicle.
At the trial, shooter Van Brett Watkins testified that Carruth paid him to kill Adams.
In addition to his testimony, the prosecution had notes Cherica Adams wrote while in the hospital. One piece of scrawled writing said she had heard Carruth say that “we’re leaving now” to someone on the phone the night of the shooting.
Amber Turner, yet another girlfriend who Carruth impregnated, testified that in 1998, Carruth directed her to have an abortion and threatened “don’t make me send somebody out there to kill you,” according to court papers. (She decided not to have the child.)
Carruth’s lawyer, however, claimed the murder had nothing to do with Adams’ pregnancy and that Watkins shot her to punish the upstanding Carruth for refusing to finance a drug deal.
Numerous witnesses for the defense testified that Carruth, who had no criminal record, was mild-mannered, kind, and never violent.
But there was no explaining away the evidence that Carruth blocked the victim’s car right before the shooting and then drove off without calling 911.
On January 2, 2001, a jury convicted Carruth of conspiracy to commit murder. He received a sentence of 18 to 24 years.
According to North Carolina Public Safety Department records, Carruth served his time in minimum security and didn’t make any trouble. He worked as a barber for his fellow inmates for $1 a day.
But shortly before his release from Sampson Correctional Institution on October 22, 2018, Carruth began making waves by declaring that he wanted custody of Chancellor.
He expressed regret about the death of Cherica Adams and apologized in a letter to her mother, Saundra Adams, who has had custody of Chancellor since he was a baby.
Carruth claimed that both he and Cherica were seeing a number of different people, and he wasn’t worried about her pregnancy at all because it wasn’t necessarily his.
In his handwritten 15-page note, he praised Saundra Adams for helping Chancellor overcome the challenges from his cerebral palsy. He learned to walk and talk, which doctors originally thought was impossible.
But Carruth also wrote a number of things not particularly endearing to the mother of a murdered daughter. For example:
"Never was Cherica under the illusion (or delusion) that I was ever going to propose marriage to her. Lust was the tie that bound us, not like or love... We randomly 'hooked up' a hand full of times and never made it about anything more than that."
Now, to be sure, Rae Carruth is not the kind of athlete who played too much football without his helmet. He double-majored in English and education at the University of Colorado in Boulder and made the academic All-Big 12 team.
But it bears repeating: He really should have done a more intelligent job of editing his declaration of contrition to Saundra Adams, including the part where he reminded her that she wouldn’t “be around forever” to take care of Chancellor.
He insisted that Saundra Adams shouldn’t have to raise her grandchild — it was his job to do so.
Carruth walked out of prison on October 22, 2018, free except for nine months of supervised parole.
He moved in with a friend in Pennsylvania and began working from home, according to a Charlotte Observer story from December 11, 2018.
The article by writer Scott Fowler, who has followed the case since the beginning, reports that Carruth is now asking Saundra Adams to let him spend time with Chancellor rather than seeking custody.
For her part, Adams, who went on to become a board member of Mothers of Murdered Offspring, has said she will never relinquish custody — but she forgives Carruth and will consider allowing him to visit Chancellor, now 19.
Carruth speaks to his older son, Raelando, age 24, every day, according to Fowler’s story.
So, overall, it sounds as though Rae Carruth’s outlook is getting brighter — or at least as upbeat as a saga about a father who kills his child’s mother can be.
As for Carruth’s accomplices in the murder, driver Michael Kennedy received a sentence of 14 years and tag-along Stanley Abraham got 90 days. They’re both free now.
Triggerman Van Brett Watkins, whose attitude in the courtroom ranged from remorseful to menacing, got 50 years and is scheduled to stay behind razor wire until 2046.
Watkins apologized to Saundra Adams at the trial, and she forgave him.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the American Justice episode about the case.
