Rae Carruth: The NFL Player Who Had His Pregnant Girlfriend Killed
A First-Round Pick, a Dead Girlfriend, and a Son Who Wasn’t Supposed to Survive
On November 16, 1999, Cherica Adams called 911 from inside her car. She’d been shot four times. Eight months pregnant. Before she lost consciousness, she told the dispatcher what happened: the car in front of her had slowed down and blocked her in. Another car pulled alongside. Someone opened fire. The car that slowed down belonged to Rae Carruth, her boyfriend and the father of her unborn child.
Carruth was a wide receiver for the Carolina Panthers – 27th pick of the 1997 NFL Draft, four-year contract worth $3.7 million. He was 25 years old. Within a month, Cherica Adams was dead, their son was delivered by emergency cesarean section and left with permanent brain damage, and Carruth was found hiding in the trunk of a car in rural Tennessee, 500 miles from Charlotte.
Before Charlotte: Sacramento, Colorado, and the NFL
Carruth was born Rae Lamar Wiggins in Sacramento, California, on January 20, 1974. He attended Valley High School and went on to play four seasons at the University of Colorado, finishing with 135 catches for 2,540 yards and 11 touchdowns. His quarterbacks there were Kordell Stewart and Koy Detmer. He earned a double major in English and education, and was named a first-team All-American in 1996.
The Panthers took him in the first round of the 1997 draft. His rookie year was solid – 44 catches, 545 yards, four touchdowns, and a spot on the all-rookie team. Then he broke his right foot in the opening game of 1998 and missed the rest of the season. By 1999 he’d played only five games, catching 14 passes for 200 yards, when everything stopped.
He already had one child – a son, Rae Jr., born to his college girlfriend Michelle Wright. Wright had sued him for child support, and Carruth had been paying $2,700 a month, half of what a judge ordered, with Wright accepting the reduced amount on the condition he’d be more involved. He was not more involved.
Cherica Adams – Who She Was Before the Night She Was Shot
Cherica Adams was 24. She’d grown up in Charlotte and was building a career in real estate. She and Carruth had been dating, and by fall 1999 she was eight months pregnant. By her own account and by those of people who knew her, she wanted the child. Carruth reportedly pushed for an abortion. She refused.
Prosecutors would later argue this was the crux of everything – Carruth did not want to pay child support for a second child, particularly one whose paternity he’d contested. The financial math, as the state presented it, was simple and brutal: it was cheaper to have her killed than to pay for 18 years of support.
That argument is worth sitting with for a second, because it almost sounds too cold to be real. But Van Brett Watkins, the man who pulled the trigger, confirmed it under oath. So did Michael Kennedy, who drove the car. So did Cherica Adams herself, from the back of an ambulance, before she slipped into the coma she never came out of.
November 16, 1999: What Actually Happened
Carruth and Adams went to a movie together that night. They drove separately. On a quiet residential road near Carruth’s home in south Charlotte, Carruth slowed his car. A second car, carrying Watkins and Kennedy, pulled up alongside Adams. Watkins fired a .357 Charter Arms revolver through her window four times.
She was hit in the neck, chest, and torso. Somehow she reached her phone and called 911. The recording – played at trial – is hard to listen to. She named Carruth. She said his car had stopped in front of hers. She described the second car pulling up. She was conscious long enough for paramedics to reach her. The baby was delivered at the hospital by emergency cesarean section that night.
Carruth went to the police and posted $3 million bail. The condition attached: if either Adams or the infant died, he would turn himself in. Adams died on December 14. Carruth didn’t turn himself in. He fled. Federal marshals found him on December 15 in Parkers Crossroads, Tennessee – in the trunk of a car parked outside a motel. The trunk also contained $3,900 in cash, bottles of his urine, candy bars, extra clothing, and a cell phone.
What Happened to the Baby
Chancellor Lee Adams was born without oxygen for 70 minutes before delivery. Doctors were blunt with Saundra Adams, Cherica’s mother: the damage was severe. Cerebral palsy. Permanent brain damage. Early prognoses suggested he might never leave a wheelchair, might never speak more than a few words.
Saundra took him home. She has raised him since the night he was born.
Chancellor is now in his mid-twenties. He walks. He speaks in short sentences. In 2021, at age 21, he graduated from Vance High School in Charlotte – part of the school’s final graduating class before it was renamed Julius L. Chambers High School, after the civil rights attorney who fought to desegregate Charlotte’s schools. Saundra Adams told reporters she found something meaningful in that timing. Her grandson, who wasn’t supposed to survive, walked at the last graduation ceremony a school named after a Confederate soldier would ever hold.
A week after Carruth was released from prison in 2018, the Panthers invited Saundra and Chancellor to a game. Players gave Chancellor gloves and a football. Owner David Tepper met them on the sidelines.
The Trial: Four Charges, One Acquittal, and 18 Years
The trial began in October 2000 in Charlotte and ran through January 2001. Prosecutors charged Carruth with four counts: first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle, and using an instrument to destroy an unborn child. The last charge reflected a specific provision in North Carolina law treating harm to a viable fetus as a separate criminal offense from any harm to the mother. Prosecutors pushed for the death penalty on the murder count.
Carruth’s attorney, David Rudolf, offered an alternative theory. His client had been entangled with dangerous people through a drug deal gone wrong. Watkins, Rudolf argued, had shot Adams in a sudden rage after she dismissed him – not because Carruth had paid him to do it. Carruth knew these men but had no knowledge of any plan to kill anyone.
The jury didn’t fully buy either version. They acquitted Carruth of first-degree murder – the charge that required proving he personally planned and intended her death with premeditation – but convicted him on the other three counts. The conspiracy conviction required only that he had entered into an agreement to commit the murder, and that someone took an overt step to carry it out. Watkins’ testimony, Kennedy’s testimony, and the phone records tying them all together were enough.
Carruth was sentenced to 18 years and 11 months to 24 years and 4 months. Watkins, who had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, got 40 to 50 years. He died in prison on December 3, 2023, at age 63, at the Scotland Correctional Institution in Laurinburg, North Carolina. Kennedy cooperated without a plea deal, served 10 years, and was released in 2011.
Why the First-Degree Murder Acquittal Still Confuses People
The short answer: conspiracy and first-degree murder are different things, and juries can split between them without contradicting themselves.
First-degree murder required the prosecution to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Carruth personally and deliberately planned to end Cherica Adams’ life. The conspiracy charge required proof that he agreed with others to have it done, and that at least one person acted on that agreement. Rudolf’s argument – that Carruth was present but unaware of Watkins’ specific intent – apparently created enough doubt on the murder count to produce an acquittal. The jury believed he was part of a conspiracy without being convinced he gave the kill order himself.
The death penalty came off the table the moment they returned not guilty on count one. What remained was still nearly 19 years in prison.
Saundra Adams: Raising Chancellor, Forgiving Carruth
Saundra Adams has given dozens of interviews over two decades. She visits prisons and speaks to convicted murderers about forgiveness as part of an ongoing volunteer commitment. She raised Chancellor through surgeries, therapy, and the years when doctors kept adjusting what they thought he’d be able to do. She calls Cherica “Mommy Angel.” So does Chancellor.
Before Carruth was released in 2018, Saundra told reporters she planned to take Chancellor to meet him and would leave the door open. Then, days before walking out of Sampson Correctional, Carruth sent a 15-page letter through a Charlotte TV station saying he wanted custody of his son. Saundra’s response was immediate and public: Chancellor would never be raised by someone he doesn’t know, and certainly not by the person who tried to have him killed before he was born. Carruth retracted the custody claim within days.
In December 2019, Carruth sent several thousand dollars through the court system to Saundra and Chancellor. No letter. No note. Saundra publicly acknowledged it anyway – she said it mattered, even without the words. As of 2024, she told ESPN there is no ongoing contact between Chancellor and his father.
She said she’s forgiven Rae Carruth. She’s also said, with equal clarity, that forgiveness and a relationship are separate things.
Rae Carruth After Prison
Carruth was released from Sampson Correctional Institution in Clinton, North Carolina, on October 22, 2018 – a cold morning, temperatures in the high 30s. He wore a knit cap and an unzipped jacket and said nothing to reporters. He got into a white SUV and left.
In a phone interview with Charlotte’s WSOC-TV the day before his release, he said he was frightened. “I still have to work. I still have to live. I have to exist out there and it just seems like there is so much hate and negativity toward me.” He moved to Pennsylvania initially, under a nine-month post-release supervision period that required him to check in with a probation officer and get special permission to leave the state.
After that period ended, according to Wikipedia’s most recently updated entry on his case, he relocated to the southwestern United States, married under a different name, and has refused all requests to discuss Cherica Adams or the events of November 1999. The Panthers waived him the day after his arrest in Tennessee in 1999, citing the morals clause in his contract. The NFL suspended him indefinitely the day after that. He has never played another professional game.
What This Case Actually Changed – and What It Didn’t
The Carruth case is frequently cited as one of the most shocking criminal cases in NFL history. That’s accurate. It’s also worth being specific about what made it shocking, because it wasn’t just the violence.
Cherica Adams’ 911 call – made while she was dying, in explicit detail, naming the man responsible – became the spine of the prosecution’s case. Without it, the conspiracy charge would have been harder to prove and the outcome might have been different. She saved her own son’s life by surviving long enough for a cesarean section, and she put the man who had her shot in prison by staying conscious long enough to explain what happened. The fact that she did both of those things under those circumstances is something most coverage of this case passes over quickly.
The NFL’s response was swift on paper – waiver, suspension, indefinite ban – but the league had no formal domestic violence policy in 1999, and the Carruth case didn’t create one. That came 15 years later, after Ray Rice. Whether the league learned anything from Charlotte in 1999 is debatable. The evidence suggests it didn’t, not structurally.
Carruth served 18 years and is now living quietly somewhere in the Southwest, apparently unwilling to discuss any of it. Chancellor Lee Adams, the person this entire story actually happened to, graduated high school and lives with his grandmother in Charlotte. He’s 25. His mother was 24 when she died. Saundra Adams has pointed out that parallel more than once, and it doesn’t get easier to sit with.
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