CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Rae Carruth didn't want this. Not the woman carrying his child to be shot four times and implicate him before enduring a slow, agonizing death.
The former NFL receiver surely didn't envision sweating through a 12-week trial on first-degree murder charges that could bring him the death penalty.
And Carruth never dreamed that Van Brett Watkins, the confessed gunman, would describe the murder of Cherica Adams in chilling detail in courtroom testimony, then point the finger directly at him:
She was screaming. She was drowning in her own blood. I could hear gurgling sounds.
*
Carruth, a first-round draft pick of the Carolina Panthers in 1997, must long for the days when his greatest concern was holding onto the football. Guilty or not, his life became a tangled web in Charlotte.
Prosecutors say he planned and paid for Watkins to murder Adams and the unborn child on Nov. 16, 1999, because he did not want to be saddled with child-support payments, only to see the job botched. Adams, 24, died a month later but the baby boy, Chancellor Lee Adams, was delivered by Caesarean section six weeks before full term and lived.
The defense contends that Watkins acted alone, impulsively pulling the trigger out of rage because Carruth wouldn't finance a marijuana deal.
The jury will hear the end of closing arguments and probably begin deliberations today, sorting through mountains of conflicting evidence wheeled into the courtroom every day.
This was the most heinous in recent violence involving pro football players. And the trial graphically illustrated how a seemingly mild-mannered, wealthy young athlete with no criminal record could become easily derailed.
Carruth, 26, didn't drink, smoke or use drugs. He took kids under his wing, spending free time bowling and playing video games with them. He had numerous girlfriends, among them Adams, who sold houses by day and worked as a stripper by night.
But the shady characters who inevitably gravitate to athletes, the kind Carruth avoided through high school and college, latched onto him in Charlotte. The most noticeable in his circle was Watkins, 40, a career criminal with a history of mental illness. Watkins pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, rather than face a first-degree charge, in exchange for his testimony.
Prosecutors, however, did not call him as a witness, concluding that the case against Carruth was strong enough and Watkins too unpredictable.
