Murder, miracles and Rae Carruth: 25 years later, an exclusive update on a shocking story
On a dark night in Charlotte 25 years ago, Chancellor Lee Adams’ life began in blood and chaos.
His pregnant mother, Cherica Adams, saved the life of her unborn son in 1999 with a remarkable 12-minute 911 call she completed despite being shot four times in a drive-by ambush.
Chancellor Lee’s father was Rae Carruth, a wide receiver for the Carolina Panthers. Carruth didn’t shoot his pregnant girlfriend himself, but he would later be convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with her death. He served nearly 19 years in prison before being released in 2018.
Van Brett Watkins, the hitman who testified in court that Carruth hired him to shoot and kill Cherica Adams and Carruth’s own baby, died in prison in 2023.
But now Chancellor Lee Adams, who was never supposed to survive that shooting, lives a life filled with love. He still resides in Charlotte with Saundra Adams, who is Cherica’s mother and his grandmother and full-time caregiver.
Chancellor Lee will turn 25 on Nov. 16, 2024. He suffered permanent brain damage and has cerebral palsy due to the traumatic circumstances of his premature birth. He still needs some help dressing and feeding himself. He communicates mostly by speaking one or two words at a time. He will always need a live-in caregiver.
But the boy they couldn’t kill is now a young man who rides horses, plays board games and graduated from high school in Charlotte in 2021. To see him astride a horse at Victory Farm, a therapeutic riding center in Gastonia, seems miraculous, but it happens every week. He’s a joyous young man, one who delights in puzzles, horses (including Roanie, the one he usually rides) and his grandmother.
When I asked him if he was looking forward to his 25th birthday and the bowling party his grandmother has planned for him, he said: “Yeah!”
When Chancellor Lee has his birthday, he will be exactly the same age his father was at the time of the shooting. He will also have lived one year longer than his mother, who never fully recovered from her wounds and died at age 24 on Dec. 14, 1999, four weeks after the shooting. Chancellor Lee knows his mother only from photos — he and his grandmother refer to Cherica as “Mommy Angel.” Every time they see a butterfly, they believe it is a sign that Cherica is checking in on them.
“I think she’s smiling down on us,” Saundra Adams said during a recent interview in Freedom Park, as her grandson sat beside her under an oak tree. “I think she’s very pleased with his progress and the young man that he is becoming.”
As the 25th anniversary of one of the most notorious crimes in Charlotte and NFL history approached, I revisited what has become the story of my journalistic lifetime. It’s a story of murder and betrayal. Angels and devils. Love and forgiveness.
I’ve covered the Carruth/Adams case off and on since the 1990s, writing tens of thousands of words about it for The Charlotte Observer and publishing an eight-part podcast called “Carruth” in 2018 on the eve of the former NFL player’s release from prison.
For this story, I re-interviewed many of the key people involved, visited multiple times with Saundra and Chancellor Lee Adams and studied all the evidence from the case that is still stowed deep in the bowels of the Mecklenburg County Courthouse.
And although Carruth has tried hard to stay off the grid since he was released from prison six years ago, I tracked him down again, too.
The choice to forgive Carruth
Saundra Adams has called her grandson “the miracle child” ever since he beat the odds by surviving. Chancellor Lee Adams was born 10 weeks prematurely. Because of the bullets that pierced his mother, he was deprived of blood and oxygen for critical minutes just prior to his birth. He weighed three pounds, 11 ounces when he was born. He was delivered by an emergency trauma team in the Charlotte hospital then known as Carolinas Medical Center, only about 80 minutes after his mother was shot. At birth, he was in such respiratory distress that his skin looked slightly blue.
Cherica Adams was Saundra Adams’ only biological child. Saundra Adams said she long ago forgave Carruth and the three men who were in the car that pulled up next to her daughter 25 years ago and changed the trajectory of her family’s life forever.
“I really don’t have any kind of hateful feelings toward Rae or anything like that,” she said. “We made a decision early on to forgive, and that has helped me on my journey. ... Forgiveness is a choice. It freed me up from being held in bondage by him.”
Saundra Adams also kept up an occasional correspondence with the man who shot her daughter while he was alive. Of the four co-conspirators sentenced in the murder — the other three are all now out of prison — it was Watkins who expressed the most remorse for the crime and who wrote to her the most frequently.
As far as Carruth, Adams has had very little contact with her grandson’s father over the past 25 years. But she now is more open than she has ever been to the possibility of allowing the former Panther — whose facial resemblance to Chancellor Lee is uncanny — to be part of his son’s life.
“When you have a strong faith like we do,” Adams said, “I think time has given me an opportunity to see things differently and to really heal my broken heart. And so when I think of Rae right now, all I think about is honoring him as Chancellor Lee’s father. ... People see Chancellor and they say, ‘Oh, he’s a handsome young man.’ And I do say I’m so glad that Rae was really handsome on the outside. And I hope that with the time that has passed, he’s becoming more handsome on the inside, too. ... I would love to hear from him.”
‘I genuinely want no part of it’
Now 50 years old, Carruth lives in the southwestern United States. He’s married. He goes by an entirely different name. He has not been part of Chancellor Lee’s life before or after he got out of prison in 2018. And when I recently located him and made contact, he didn’t want to be interviewed for this story.
During a series of text messages we exchanged, Carruth wrote: “Respectfully I no longer want to discuss anything that has to do with what happened on Nov. 16, 1999. ... It’s never going to turn out good for me, so I decline. And I’m well aware that with or without me, a story is going to be written soon, with the 25-year anniversary right around the corner. But I genuinely want no part of it.”
The fact that Carruth has been a free man for the past six years still rankles some who were involved in the case.
“I think Rae should be in prison for the rest of his life,” said Darrell Price, a retired detective who worked for more than 42 years for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department and helped catch Carruth. “What he did — not only killing Cherica but permanently (disabling) Chancellor? Chancellor has to live with that the rest of his life. I don’t know why Rae gets to live a normal life now.”
Originally from Sacramento, Carruth got a scholarship to play college football at the University of Colorado. There he was a speedy all-conference wide receiver in the mid-1990s, one that the Panthers and other teams coveted due to his game-breaking ability.
Coming off an unlikely run to the NFC Championship game in 1996 in only their second NFL season, the Panthers felt like Carruth could be the missing piece to an offense that needed another breakaway threat. They drafted him in the first round — No. 27 overall — in 1997.
In 1997, Carruth beat out a couple of veteran Panthers to earn a starting role as a rookie. He made the NFL’s all-rookie team in 1997, catching 44 passes for 545 yards and four touchdowns. If you were to gauge his on-field impact, he wasn’t yet an NFL star, although the potential seemed to be there. But his first-year statistics were similar to what the rookie wide receiver Xavier Legette has posted for the Panthers so far in 2024. Like Carruth, Legette was a first-round wide receiver pick who Carolina fans were very excited about.
And as his 1997 rookie season ended, Carruth seemed to be on top of the world — young, rich and at least semi-famous. He had signed a four-year, $3.7-million contract with the Panthers in 1997, getting $1.3 million in a lump-sum signing bonus and then earning about $37,500 per game for as long as he was on the roster.
But 1997 was as good as it would get for Carruth, whose body began to break down. He missed 14 of 16 games in his second season in 1998 due to injury. By the time of the shooting in November 1999, the 5-foot-11, 194-pound Carruth was again being plagued by injuries. His NFL future was uncertain.
Rae and Cherica
During his teens and early twenties, Carruth had relationships with a number of women. He was charismatic enough that in high school in California he was voted the school’s prom king — twice.
By the time Carruth got to Charlotte, he had already fathered a child while in college with Michelle Wright, his high school girlfriend. He was paying $3,000 a month in child support for that son (who, many years later, he has been in contact with numerous times since he got out of prison).
Another woman named Amber Turner would later testify that Carruth also got her pregnant in early 1998. Turner said on the stand in 2001 during Carruth’s murder trial in Charlotte that Carruth pressured her to have an abortion, saying: “Don’t make me send somebody out there to kill you. You know I would do it. You can’t have this baby.”
In the summer of 1998, Carruth and Cherica Adams met at a pool party in Charlotte. They were attracted to each other and saw each other several times more that summer but then fell out of touch. Both were dating other people at the time.
In November 1998, however, they reconnected when Carruth attended a birthday party for a Panthers teammate at a strip club. Adams, who held a variety of real-estate jobs in her 20s, also worked part-time as a stripper for a few months. She happened to be there that night.
From there, the two had an on-again, off-again relationship. At one point Carruth gave Adams a cell phone as a gift, which in those days was a somewhat uncommon accessory.
“Rae wants to be able to keep in better touch with me,” Adams told her friends and family.
By April 1999, Cherica Adams was pregnant, and the baby was Carruth’s (this was later confirmed by DNA testing). She was thrilled with the pregnancy and told her mother, Saundra Adams, about her future grandchild on Mother’s Day 1999, as they ate breakfast at a Charlotte pancake house.
Carruth, however, wanted Adams to have an abortion. Already paying $3,000 a month in child support for the child he had while in college, Carruth wasn’t happy with the idea of fathering another.
Adams, though, had made the wrenching choice to have an abortion earlier in her life. She had since made clear to her mother that she never wanted to go through that again. She told Carruth that she planned to have the baby and that, if necessary, she would raise the child as a single mom with the help of her family.
On Nov. 16, 1999, Adams made the 911 call that would be played over and over again in a Charlotte courtroom.
To do so, she used the same cell phone Carruth had once given her.
The original crime: What we know, what we don’t
Some of the facts of the shooting 25 years ago aren’t in dispute.
Some are, even today.
There is no doubt that the car that Watkins was a passenger in pulled alongside Cherica Adams’ black BMW sedan shortly after midnight on Nov. 16, 1999.
Watkins admitted in court that he then rolled down the window in the back passenger seat and shot five times with a .38 special. The gun had only been acquired earlier that night for $100 by Michael Kennedy, a friend of Carruth’s who was driving the car. That’s what Kennedy told the police.
Four of the five shots hit Adams. Within minutes, Watkins would throw the gun out of the car. He tried to sling it into a creek but missed. It would be found by a passerby months later.
The gun still resides in a dented box in the Mecklenburg County Courthouse. It is a small weapon, now rusty, but the damage it caused was enormous.
There is no doubt Adams was following Carruth, who was driving a white Ford Expedition SUV, after they had arrived separately (at Carruth’s request) for a movie date at Regal Cinema in south Charlotte. They saw the 9:45 p.m. showing of a movie called “The Bone Collector” that starred Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie and was about a serial killer. The movie receipt is still in the evidence folder, too.
There is no doubt that the shooters’ car — a rented Nissan Maxima driven by Kennedy, who would later admit under oath that he was a drug dealer at the time — drove up beside Adams on Rea Road and then drove away after Watkins fired the five shots. There is no doubt Watkins felt no remorse, initially.
“I was so bad back then,” Watkins told me in 2018 about his actions that night. “I didn’t give a damn, OK?”
There is no doubt that Watkins thought he had killed Adams immediately by shooting through the BMW’s tinted windows.
But he hadn’t.
Kennedy saw Adams’ brake lights blink back on after the shooting and figured that meant she was alive. But he pretended he didn’t see those lights and just kept driving. Kennedy would tell police later that he and his best friend, Stanley “Boss” Abraham, seated in the front passenger seat, were both scared that Watkins was going to shoot them, too, and just wanted to get him out of the car as quickly as possible. (This hunch was correct. Watkins would have indeed shot both Kennedy and Abraham, he told me later from prison, but he had already thrown away his extra bullets earlier in the evening).
A badly wounded Adams then drove several hundred yards into a nearby neighborhood, where she ended up in the front yard of a house while calling 911 to ask for help at 12:31 a.m.
The call lasted for 12 excruciating minutes, as Adams moaned in pain. But it was quite clear on several occasions about what she thought had happened.
An excerpt:
911 Medic: OK, can you tell what part of your body you’re shot on?
Cherica Adams: My back. My neck.
911 Medic: OK, how did this happen?
Cherica Adams: I was following my baby’s daddy, Rae Carruth, the football player.
911 Medic: So you think he did it?
Cherica Adams: He slowed down. And a car pulled up beside me.
911 Medic: And then shot at you?
Cherica Adams: Yes.
‘I would rip you like a rag doll’
What don’t we know? Mostly this: Was Watkins acting on his own because he was angry with Carruth over what Carruth’s defense team would label a “drug deal gone bad”?
Or did Watkins shoot Cherica Adams because Carruth had promised to pay him to kill both her and his unborn son?
That central question has never been answered with complete clarity.
David Rudolf, Carruth’s lead attorney, didn’t put Carruth on the stand during the trial but presented the “drug deal gone bad” defense at length in court. In Rudolf’s courtroom argument, Carruth had agreed to lend Watkins the money to fund a large-scale marijuana deal, then backed out of the plan. Enraged, Watkins shot Adams in violent retribution.
Watkins denied this in court. He said that Carruth had masterminded the plot to kill Cherica Adams and that the 6-3, 286-pound hitman thought he had done just that. He also showed his temper several times, at one point exploding at Rudolf after the lawyer kept asking him why a hitman would come to an assignment without a gun.
“I didn’t need a gun, OK?” Watkins yelled. “For me to kill somebody, I don’t need a gun. Can’t you look and see? I’m 286 pounds, OK? I would rip you like a rag doll!”
Watkins told me in our jailhouse interview in 2018 that Cherica Adams was actually the fifth person he had been hired to kill. He claimed he had gotten away completely with his first four murders but wouldn’t provide further details about those supposed killings. He also said that every time he hurt someone he soon became hungry, and that after shooting Adams he ate at a Charlotte Waffle House.
Carruth ‘scared and took off,’ attorney says
In his 2018 interview with The Observer, Rudolf — who Carruth had given authorization to speak — talked in detail with me about the case. It became one of the most well-known cases of the prominent defense attorney’s career, though not the most famous. Rudolf was also the defense attorney for the murder trial of Michael Peterson, which turned into the Netflix documentary “The Staircase.”
In our 2018 interview, Rudolf said Carruth had panicked when he saw the car with Watkins inside pull up next to Adams’ black BMW, because Carruth was afraid that Watkins was coming to shoot him.
“He was scared and he took off,” Rudolf said. “And he’s not particularly proud of that. It’s not sort of a heroic thing to do — big football player, you know, running. But that’s what he did.”
Then, Rudolf continued: “Instead, Van Brett Watkins shoots Cherica. And then Rae suddenly finds himself in a situation where — he’s been there. He left. And what’s he going to do? I mean he knows these guys. And so he sort of panicked. …
“So that’s the truth as far as I know, and as far as Rae has told me. It makes perfect sense to me.”
Rudolf added that Carruth had been adamant that he never stopped his car that night. But Carruth told Rudolf that he might have slowed down briefly to see what was happening before he sped off.
“Nothing to be proud of,” said Rudolf, who still lives and works in Charlotte. “But it’s also not a hit.”
Cherica Adams’ police interview
In the hospital on Nov. 16, 1999, Cherica Adams briefly awoke a few hours after her baby was born by emergency C-section. Price, the CMPD homicide detective, was able to ask her some questions. Because she was intubated and couldn’t talk, she responded by writing down her answers. As with her 911 call, Adams put Carruth at the crime scene. In one note, she wrote of Carruth: “He was driving in front of me and stopped in the road. And a car pulled up beside me, and he blocked the front and never came back.”
Adams knew that she had saved her baby from immediate death by then — he was fighting for his own life on a different floor of the hospital. But she still wasn’t quite sure how the crime had occurred.
In one moment, she was supposed to be following Carruth to her home. In the next, she had been shot four times and was bleeding so badly that the hospital had a difficult time pumping blood into her to compensate for what she was losing. Adams lost six liters of blood that day, a doctor would later testify in her trial, which was about one and a half times what her body would normally hold. Still, she answered everything she could.
“I remember asking if she thought Rae had anything to do with this,” Price, who retired from CMPD in 2023, said when we spoke last week. “And her answer was just a question mark.”
Eventually, Adams grew tired and needed to sleep. Price had a lot more questions, but thought he would have plenty more time to ask them based on what he heard at the hospital.
“When I spoke to the doctors that day, they said Cherica had a really good chance of survival, but they weren’t sure about the baby,” Price said.
Instead, Chancellor Lee Adams survived, but his mother never regained consciousness after those few hours that first day. Due to complications from the shooting, her health deteriorated. A treatment that the doctors tried caused her to retain a massive amount of fluid, and her weight ballooned.
Cherica Adams, who was 5-4, came into the hospital weighing about 120 pounds. After several weeks of fluid retention, her weight ballooned to 282 pounds. After Adams spent nearly four weeks in a coma, being kept alive by machines with no real hope of recovery, her family decided to let her go.
Before her life support was unplugged, though, Chancellor Lee was brought in from another floor of the hospital to see his mother one final time. Cherica didn’t wake up, but those in that hospital room were watching the monitors and swear that her heartbeat jumped in recognition when the baby was placed gently on her chest.
Cherica Luvenia Adams died on Dec. 14, 1999 at age 24.
Chancellor Lee Adams went home with his grandmother 17 days later. Nearly 25 years later, they’re still together. They visit the gravesite of “Mommy Angel” occasionally, but they don’t believe she’s still there.
Instead, they believe she’s in heaven, and that they will see her there one day.
“Chancellor is a lot like Cherica,” Saundra Adams said as we sat recently at that picnic table in Freedom Park. “He doesn’t want help. He wants to do it himself. And that makes me think about that infamous 911 call. Cherica was determined to let us know what happened to her. So when I look at the determination in him, it makes me smile, thinking about how she spent her last breaths, making sure he got into this world.”
‘Rae Carruth, the Carolina Panther’
Carruth would be arrested in December 1999. But first, he hid in a trunk driven by yet another female friend, fled the city of Charlotte and traveled 500 miles away to Wildersville, Tenn., before the FBI caught him in a Best Western hotel parking lot, still curled up outside of Room 149 in the trunk of a gray Toyota Camry.
Before Carruth made the decision to climb into that trunk, he was still technically on the Panthers’ roster. But the team cut ties with him after Carruth fled, waiving him. The NFL suspended him indefinitely. In a prepared statement, Panthers owner Jerry Richardson said at the time: “Our decision was based on Rae’s actions over the last 48 hours and is not a statement about the case.”
George Seifert was the Panthers’ head coach at the time, and was asked shortly after Carruth fled in the trunk if the former first-round draft pick would ever be truly dissociated from the team.
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In what proved to be a prescient statement, Seifert said: “I don’t know that that’ll ever (happen). As we listen to the radio or read the paper, ‘Rae Carruth, the Carolina Panther’ is the way he’s presented. But that’s such a minor issue. Look at all the lives that have been destroyed by this thing. That’s the tragic issue in all of this.”
The Carruth trial began in late 2000 and carried over into January 2001. Televised nationally by Court TV, it was a media circus — the closest Charlotte has ever come to its own O.J. Simpson trial. It included more than 70 witnesses and 300-plus exhibits. The 911 tape was played multiple times.
“Yes, I had concerns,” lead prosecutor Gentry Caudill told me once in an interview. “On the other hand, we had Cherica Adams and she was the strongest witness for herself — to her own murder.”
The one witness everyone in the courtroom remembers was Watkins, an intimidating presence with the build of an NFL defensive tackle. I’ve spoken to some people who still work in the Mecklenburg County Courthouse today who say they had nightmares about Watkins simply after seeing him 25 years ago, in chains in the courthouse hallways.
Watkins’ testimony was compelling enough that it also was sometimes watched on a large TV in the Carolina Panthers’ locker room — only one mile away from the courthouse — by clusters of Carruth’s former teammates.
During frequently combative testimony, Watkins admitted he had once been overheard saying “I hope the bitch dies.” But when Rudolf pressed him, Watkins said he wasn’t referring to Cherica Adams with that slur.
Instead, Watkins extended his left arm, pointed toward the defendant and said: “That’s the bitch I was talking about — Rae Carruth.”
The jury’s controversial decision
When the trial ended, in January 2001, the jury ended up reaching a compromise verdict that didn’t please anyone. Carruth was sentenced to almost 19 years in prison, with credit for time served.
“There was no winner in this case,” Caudill said. “It was just a tragedy all around.”
But while Carruth was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder — indicating the jury believed the prosecution’s theory that he orchestrated the plot to murder Cherica Adams and their unborn son because he didn’t want to pay child support for another baby — he was found not guilty of first-degree murder.
Jury foreman Clark Pennell said in a phone interview this week that he believed the reason the jury arrived at the compromise verdict was because Carruth hadn’t literally shot Adams himself.
“The main thing was that Carruth didn’t pull the trigger,” Pennell said. “He masterminded the crime, he tried to cover it up, he ran — all that stuff. But with him not pulling the trigger, some of the jury members had a hard time with the first-degree murder charge.”
Rudolf would later say in our 2018 interview — when he spoke with Carruth’s authorization — that the jury’s decision now seemed justified to him.
“Looking back on it now, I think in some strange way the jury sort of figured it out,” Rudolf said. “You know? And sort of compromised to a place that … even Rae can accept, ‘OK, I get it. I’m responsible for this situation so I needed to pay a price. ...’ In a strange sort of way, the jury probably got it right.”
Watkins, meanwhile, had already pleaded guilty to second-degree murder as part of his plea bargain, which meant he wouldn’t get the death penalty. But his sentence was substantially longer than Carruth’s. He died in December 2023 in prison, at age 63, still decades from a release date that would never come. Kennedy, the driver who also bought the gun that Watkins used, served nearly 11 years before getting out of prison in 2011. Abraham, the front-seat passenger whose involvement in the actual crime was minimal, served a little less than two years and was released in 2001.
I did a three-hour jailhouse interview with Watkins in 2018, which to my knowledge is the last substantial one he ever gave to a journalist. His anger for Carruth — whom he still blamed for his incarceration — continued unabated. He was furious that Carruth was about to get out of prison.
“I won’t forgive Rae Carruth,” Watkins said then. “I want him dead.”
And, Watkins said, he wished he knew how to make that happen.
“I’m trying to figure out a way to kill him,” the hitman said.
Even then, Watkins was having health issues. He walked slowly with a cane to meet me when we spoke through bullet-proof, double-pane glass at Central Prison in Raleigh. A few years later, his mobility problems grew to the point that he could hardly get around at all. Saundra Adams took no comfort in this, but she did note the irony of it in our recent interview.
“Van Brett Watkins, in his last days, could barely walk,” she said. “It was such a turn.”
Then she acted for a moment as if she was addressing an invisible Watkins.
“What you did to him,” Adams said, nodding at her grandson seated beside her, “happened to you.”
Protagonist, antagonist
Carruth’s various appeals failed and he ended up serving almost his full sentence. He was released on Oct. 22, 2018, getting into a car with family members and riding away from the minimum-custody facility at Sampson Correctional Institution, about 190 miles east of Charlotte.
Rudolf said in our interview authorized by Carruth that year that the former NFL player understood he was “morally responsible” for bringing Watkins into Cherica Adams’ life — even though the former NFL player has always disputed that he hired Watkins as a hitman.
“He (Carruth) sort of thinks it sort of came out probably where it should have, in that he was responsible for putting Cherica in that place,” Rudolf said. “You know, it wouldn’t have been (correct) for him to be convicted of first-degree murder or put on death row. But the fact that he ended up in prison for some significant period of time? I don’t think he’s bitter about that. … He blames himself for where he ended up. And I think that’s significant. I think for someone to have that level of self-awareness and take responsibility like that is impressive.”
Once an aspiring screenwriter in college, Carruth wrote me a letter shortly before he got out of prison. He wrote that he understood he would always be the villain in the story of Nov. 16, 1999, and its aftermath.
The letter began like this: “In every great piece of literature, there’s always a protagonist and an antagonist. ... The latter applies to me — and that’s something that will never change. ...
“There’s absolutely nothing that I could ever say or do to right my wrongs … to no longer be ‘the bad guy.’ ”
Carruth is prone to philosophical thoughts like that. Once, in 2018, I showed up at his door in Pennsylvania, where he first lived after his release. He invited me inside and we had a 30-minute conversation at his kitchen table, although he wouldn’t talk about the night of Nov. 16, 1999.
Later, he wrote me in an email: “Do you think that it’s possible for a generally good person to get him/herself involved in a situation as heart-wrenchingly horrible as the one I was in, or is it your belief that such a person could only be cut from the worst of molds?”
Signs of both parents in Chancellor Lee
Since the trial, Chancellor Lee and Saundra Adams have quietly gone on about their lives in Charlotte. The grandmother was once told her grandson would likely never walk or talk. After years of physical therapy, he can do both now — albeit with the aid of a walker. Saundra Adams, now 66, said she sees signs of both her daughter and Carruth in her grandson every day.
“He is a very good mix of Cherica and Rae,” Adams said. “Of course, I think when people initially see him, they immediately say, ‘Oh, he looks just like his dad.’ But I see so much of his mom in him too. ... Determination. Cherica had that. ... Athletic ability, with his therapy and his horseback riding. I mean, he is just relentless. He won’t give up. He doesn’t quit. ... He really wants to please so much. ... And I see that athletic ability and I think if he didn’t have the cerebral palsy, oh, he probably would have outrun his dad any day.”
After becoming a free man, Carruth sent his son a few thousand dollars through the court system in 2019 (he has owed the Adamses millions in unpaid damages since 2003 after a wrongful death civil suit she filed against him and his co-conspirators). But he hasn’t had any face-to-face contact with his son since Chancellor Lee was a baby.
‘Exactly who he is’
Chancellor Lee Adams is at the center of this story. Everyone else is connected to the young man with the huge smile.
Rae Carruth originally hoped he would never exist. Van Brett Watkins shot him. Cherica Adams saved him. Saundra Adams raised him. Many people love him.
Saundra has long focused on what Chancellor Lee can do and not what he can’t, preferring to say he is “abled differently” rather than “disabled.” She does, however, sometimes wonder what might have been had Chancellor Lee not been born in the midst of so much trauma and so little oxygen.
“I really see the disparity with his age compared to other young men his same age,” she said. “When he was young, I really didn’t. And I still do have this relentless faith that he is going to lead as normal of a life as he can. But as he is turning 25, it’s really a big difference.
“Some of his cousins who are 25, and they’re already in their careers,” Adams continued. “Some of them already have children and are living on their own. As he gets older, the age gap is widening even more. So I see that, and it kind of saddens me. But I don’t dwell on it much.”
Indeed, Adams continued, she believes her grandson is a gift from God.
“I never want Chancellor Lee to think that he was an unwanted child or he was here by mistake,” she said. “He was ordained to be here and to be exactly who he is. I think, in retrospect, his life is changing more lives just the way he is now, than if it had been different.”
“Yeah!” Chancellor Lee chimed in.
Saundra Adams turned to look at her grandson. “He’s really doing great for the prognosis that he had at the beginning,” she said. “He’s still my miracle.”
Carruth and his son: A reconnection?
As for whether Chancellor Lee will see his father again, stay tuned.
For all of Carruth’s repeated insistence that he didn’t want to be involved in this story, he was intrigued when I told him that Saundra Adams said she would like him to have her contact information so he could learn more about his son.
Carruth has only seen Chancellor Lee twice, as a baby, before he was convicted — once on the day Chancellor Lee was born and once, briefly, in a court-ordered visitation about a year later. He hasn’t seen his son at all over the past 24 years, and his family members have stayed completely out of the picture, too. But now Carruth has the opportunity to see Chancellor Lee and Saundra Adams, if he wants to take it.
Many details still need to be worked out. They live a few thousand miles away from each other. The visit would have to be negotiated and supervised. But after I communicated with both sides, this was the first time in all these years that I got the sense a meeting between Carruth and Chancellor Lee is more likely to happen than not. Eventually.
Said Saundra Adams of Carruth: “To make Chancellor’s story and life complete, it would be good if he saw him again.”
Said Carruth to me in a text message about his son: “Hopefully, I get the pleasure of meeting him one day.”
This story was originally published November 12, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
