October 16, 2018 • 36 mins
Emergency crews race Cherica Adams to Carolinas Medical Center, where her son, Chancellor Lee, is born via emergency C-section, 10 weeks premature and weighing less than 4 pounds. As both fight for life, police investigators describe to us piecing together the events of that night, with Cherica’s handwritten notes from her hospital bed pointing the way toward Rae Carruth.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
A listener. Note this story contains adult language and some
graphic descriptions of violence. Previously on Caruth the girl and
make her board a baby. I said, I don't need
a girl. I was like, why why you wanted the gun?
(00:24):
And he was like, because she was pregnant. And at
that point that's where she decided she was going to
go ahead and stay and go on with him? How
many times? And where you file this gun. That's just
not how a murder for hire takes place. He hadn't
(00:45):
hired these people to kill Sharika Adams. The ambulance carrying
Sharika Adams raced through South Charlotte and arrived at Carolina's
Medical Center around one a m. On November six, having
suffered four gunshot wounds. The expectant mother had been bleeding
(01:07):
out in the front seat of her car, depriving her
unborn son of blood and oxygen and we're okay. Her
call had led emergency responders to her door, but time
was running out for both of them. An exact drift
(01:32):
caught in Police and medics had found her BMW full
of bullet holes outside of home in Wessex Square, owned
by Ferrell Blaylock. The next thing I know, the car
pulled across the front yard and stopped and hornsteale blowing,
the flashes flashing. Blaylock died in but here he is
the night of the shooting. Talking with local news channel
(01:52):
w b t V, she said she when she first
out in the door, she said, I've been shot and
I'm pregnant, and she identified the parson was in a
like expedition. When Sharika arrived at Carolina's Medical Center, a
trauma team was ready. Her mother, Sandra Adams, lived fairly
close by in the house where she and Sharika managed
(02:13):
to see each other almost every day, except that day
because she She's like, Mom, I've got to go and
get ridy. I gotta get my outfit just right. We're
going on a real date. Little did Sandra no when
her phone rang early that Tuesday morning, and the saga
shifted to emergency rooms, waiting rooms, and interrogation rooms. Just
(02:34):
how few days they had left from the Charlotte Observer
and McClatchy Studios. This is Caruth. I'm Scott Fowler, and
this is chapter three, Life and Death. A little after
(02:58):
one am on November six, Sandra was eating a sandwich.
Normally should have been asleep at that hour, but on
that night, her mind was racing about her single daughter
being thirty weeks pregnant, about the date Sharika was on
with Rayka Ruth, the father of her child, and about
their attempt to reconcile. Sharke and I had this little
(03:19):
private thing that we would eat fried and bologna, and
she was up any so she never wanted anybody to
know she was secretly eating fried bologna. So that night
I could not sleep. I just could not sleep, and
I had gone down to the kitchen to make me
a fried bologna sandwich. There in the kitchen, Sandra thought
(03:41):
about her daughter and traditions the women in their family
handed down through the generations. About three pops of butter
popped out and burned my hand while I was doing
the onions and bologna. And another little secret thing we
did we would always My mom had told us where
you put vanilla flavoring on it and then take the
(04:02):
burnout and won't leave a scar. So I had gone
to the cabinet to get the vanilla flavor and I
was just laughing, and I was thinking, oh, Cheika will
be saying, what are you getting ready to do? Make
a pie? So it was a little inside joke and
I finished making it. Then the phone rang um when
I answered, it was the hospital on the line, and
(04:24):
my mind immediately went to I had fallen and broken
my ankle and my instruments, hadn't finished paying all of
the bill, and they had been calling me and harassing me.
So I'm thinking, I cannot believe they are calling after
midnight about this money, and so I was very irritated
(04:50):
when they told me it was the hospital and they
were like, do you have a daughter to Sharik Adams.
I was like, yes, I do, and they were like, well,
you're daughter is at the hospital. She's been shot. And
I was like, oh no. I was like, don't play
with me. You know she's at she was on the date,
(05:11):
she was at the movie. She's not in the hospital.
And they were like, we're getting ready to take her
in to do a siscerian section to deliver her baby.
And I just remember dropping to my knees and just wailing,
just God, just please don't let my baby die. The
(05:34):
four bullets had torn into Sharika's body from her left
hand side, which had been closest to the car door
and to the shooter, Van Brett Watkins. The first bullet
entered her hip, the second her side, just below her
rib cage. The third bullet entered her upper back and
then exited higher on her right side, near her shoulder blade,
(05:57):
perhaps indicating she had begun leaning away from the gunfire.
The final bullet grazed the top of Sharika's left shoulder
and then embedded in the left side of her neck. Now,
what are your body? You shot on? The four bullets
had ripped through her pancreas, stomach, liver, lungs and other organs.
(06:20):
Thank you actually hit by the bullet, and it's remarkable
she was alive at all, and police marvel to this
day at her strength that night. Her nime on one
call is painful to listen to, and she was articulate.
She gave so much information. There's a couple of points
(06:40):
we just want to grab the dispatchers saying, come on,
I'm getting it, weren't you. This is Darryl Price of
the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Force. He's been there thirty seven
years now and has searched for hundreds of murder suspects.
He was a detective assigned to investigate the shooting. After
listening to it, you're sitting there thinking it's gonna be
one of the bravest women. She just been shot four
(07:01):
times and she's able to look at a sign to
see where she's pulling into doll and I'm won one
and give such good information in front who at the hospital.
(07:23):
Surgeons immediately went to work. She had lost a lot
of blood even though she could talk a little bit.
This is Dosha Hickey, a neo natologist and the Panthers
fan who had once met Karuth during the team's football
one on one event. She took care of Chancellor Lee
during much of his stay in the hospital and quickly
became the family's favorite doctor. She had a significant injury
(07:45):
and a lot of the injury was to the abdomen,
very near to where he was. It's it's just what
It is miraculous that he survived because Shrika was in
very bad check when she came in. And he is
Chancellor Lee born at one two am on November six,
about seventy five minutes after Sharika had been shot. He
(08:06):
was ten weeks premature and weighed only three pounds eleven ounces.
He was rushed into the neonatal I see you and
respiratory distress. But he was alive and so was Sharika.
Yet doctors feared the worst. In the minutes after Sharika
was shot, blood had poured from her wounds and Chancellor
(08:27):
had begun to suffocate Insider. Her blood pressure was down.
She was hypotensive. And you can compensate for a while.
The placenta compensates, but when it gets to a certain point,
the placenta does not get enough blood flow. When that happens,
the baby doesn't get oxygen to all the organs, but
especially the one you worry about the most is the brain. Unfortunately,
(08:49):
the brain is not an organ that can regenerate. The
liver can regenerate if there's part of it still there,
sometimes a kidney's camp, but the brain, it's not an
area that regenerates. Uh So he lost oxygen and that
causes brain damage. As doctor's race to save two lives,
Sandra raced to the hospital. She barely remembers getting there.
(09:11):
Sandra knows that at some point she made several phone calls,
including one to Sharika's father. When she arrived, she was
told she couldn't see her daughter or grandson yet, you know,
they came out and told me that they had to
revive Chancellor and uh, that he had severe damage to
(09:31):
his brain and they had him in uh the neo
natal unit, and Sharika they were trying to stabilize her
and they had told me, you know, they could not
retrieve all the bullets out of her, so they were
going to leave her open. And because so many of
(09:54):
her internal organs were affected, they didn't know what they
might need to do. So for the next of all hours,
with her daughter clinging to life on one floor and
her grandson fighting for breath on another, Sandra was helpless
in the waiting room. She hugged other relatives as they
showed up. She worried, and she prayed. Suddenly another thought
(10:16):
occurred to her. I immediately decided, oh my god, I
got a call ready, because I bet he didn't know
what's happened, you know, somehow she got shot going home
or whatever. And I'm like, I got a call him.
So I had two numbers. I had a cell phone
number and a deeper number for him, and so I
just continually just kept calling both both no answer and
(10:40):
I was leaving messages. I mean, it was some hours
had passed and he still hadn't called me back, and
I was just so concerned that he needed to know
what happened. Sandra still vividly remembers the next part of
that night. In fact, her recollection is one of the
few we have to go on. Jeff Mooney, Sharika's father,
passed away in two thousand five. Karuth declined repeated invitations
(11:04):
to be interviewed for this project or to answer questions
about Sharika's shooting. Garuth did allow his lead defense attorney,
David Rudolph, to speak on his behalf. I didn't ask
him about that in particular, and I don't remember what
he told me back nineteen years ago about what he
was doing in the in the meantime, But putting it
(11:24):
together with what I now know, uh, I think he
was panicked, Uh, you know, trying to figure out what
should I do? UH, And I think, you know, after
a number of phone calls, UM, trying to settle himself down. Uh,
he decided, you know, I need to go to the hospital.
(11:45):
But you know, and partly, you know, if you feel
sort of morally responsible for having set these wheels in
motion if you will, Um, you're gonna feel guilty. You know,
go into the hospital and there's the mother and the father.
(12:05):
So it's it's a really you know, it's one thing
if he hadn't you know, if this was really a
hit where you know, they drove by her apartment and
and killed her. Uh. And then then he goes to
the hospital. You know, there's there's not that same level
of of guilt and anxiety and panic. But here he is.
(12:26):
You know, he's had this argument with Van Brett Watkins.
You know, he backed out of this deal. He's in
that way caused us all to go down. He fled,
and now he's got to show up at the hospital.
You know, it's, um, it's it's a it's a difficult moment.
I think Sandra Adams saw that same tension, but in
(12:50):
a different way. And so you know you're hearing all
this from the doctors and and still no Ray is here. Uh.
And finally Ray comes in with another woman, and I
never forget the scene where they're sitting over there and
she's sitting in the chair and Race sitting in between
(13:10):
her legs and she's massaging raised shoulder. Because he's so tensed.
And I went over like a madwoman. I knew just
seeing that scene that he knew what happened to my baby.
And I confronted him. I let him know that I
know you know what happened to her, and you did it.
(13:35):
You did it. Sandra walked away. After a few minutes,
she approached Karruth again. Not once, you know, even before
I was a little more irate. He never showed no
emotion like how is Rika, how is the baby? Or
I do remember Jeff coming over and he was able
to talk to him more calmly and whatever. And I
(13:58):
remember going back up and I was like, what do
you even care what happened to it? Do you even
want to see your son? I mean, you haven't even
said anything about your son. Kruth said he did want
to see his son. So Sandra led him to the
Neo Natal. I see you. We were walking down to
the Neo Natal unit, and I recall him being on
the phone with his agent. I remembered that phone call.
(14:21):
I'm like, he's calling his agent and trying to get
a story together, and I'm like, m hmmm. So we
got down to the Nike you and they let us
in and Chancellor is hooked up to all these tubes
and then the incubator and everything, and so the nurse
(14:42):
was telling us, you know, we couldn't take him out,
but we could stick our finger in to touch him
or whatever. So I do remember asking him if he
wanted to touch him, and he said no, he just
wanted to get a picture of him. And he said,
because this my be the last time I get to
see him. And that just solidified it for me. I'm like,
(15:06):
you did it. Why else would you say you wouldn't
see him again if you didn't do it. On Chancellor
Lee's birth certificate, his mother's full name was listed, the
space for father was left blank. Caruth would later take
a DNA test to ensure the baby was his, but
for many it was hardly necessary. From the very beginning,
(15:27):
Chancellor Lee looked remarkably like his father, because I would
say when they were doing the DNA, but all of
us just sat there and went, he cannot deny that
this is his child. He had that same face, and
he looks just like Greig Ruth even in the beginning.
(15:51):
By eight that morning, law enforcement was arriving at the
hospital down at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department. A sergeant
named Tom Athey ran the homicide un it. He had
quickly assembled a team. We handled ma homicide. Suicide serisus
sauce about everything that's kind of high profile. So we're
very busy. So one of the guys on my squad
was called in. He worked for me, so then it
(16:12):
became my responsibility. So I didn't really know anything about it.
So I got to work next morning and kind of
come in and see all the loose trucks out back
and well, maybe you know, police officely gotten arrested, somebody
shot somebody, but gett any rate. I found out about
when I got there in the morning. Athe's retired now
living on the North Carolina coast, but at the time
(16:33):
he led the investigation, which sometimes included as many as
four detectives. Atheis sent Price to the hospital, saying he
would join him shortly. With luck, Price could speak with
the victim. She had been in surgery since early that
morning and she had just come out by the time
I got to the hospital. This is Price again. A
lot of family members were there, um, so I got
(16:55):
to meet them and talk to them a little bit
about what they knew they didn't know. They started talking
about her relationship with Ray, and at that point I
didn't have a lot of clue who Ray was. I
didn't watch Panthers football, so I wasn't a fanboy. Um.
The doctor's articulated they had delivered the baby very prematurely.
(17:19):
At that point, their prognosis was that Sharika would probably survive,
but the baby most likely would not. They right, They
really were concerned because Chancellor had to be revived. He
had literally passed away and he had to be revived,
so they were really concerned about his stability. Normally, I
(17:40):
have a difficult time with the children cases. I had
a child at the time she's now grown adult. My
child then was seven years old. But in this case,
I just remember being more focused on hoping she would
come out of her anesthesius so that we could try
to talk to her that day, because the information would
(18:02):
have been more fresh that day. About seven hours after
arriving at the hospital, Sharika was wheeled out of surgery
and into a recovery room. Her family soon joined her.
For several hours after that, Sharika was able to communicate,
but because she was intibated, the tube inserted down her
(18:22):
throat made her unable to speak, so instead she wrote.
It was one of the nurses that had made the
suggestion that she couldn't talk, but possibly she could write
here's price again, And so she was given a pad
and pen and the nurse had asked a few questions first,
and she was able to write the answers down, so
at that point started asking more questions about where she
(18:46):
had been and who she had been with, and what
had occurred to her that particular day. Through the entire ordeal,
Sharika had lost six liters of blood, one and a
half times what her body would have normally held, and
of course she had just delivered a baby, and she'd
asked for the pay it and pencil. With everything Sharika
(19:06):
had endured, Price wondered how lucid she could be. But
there was no question in Saundra's mind. I knew she
knew what she was talking about, because Serrika hated to
have chap lips, she absolutely hated, and they had these
tubes and stuff, and she was writing on the paper chapstick,
and I said, she knows exactly what she's talking about,
(19:28):
and she was able to give us enough to where
we were able to take that lead and work with it.
One of the questions I know was do you think
Ray was involved? And she just made a question mark
after that. I've seen copies of those notes, Sharika wrote.
The handwriting is obviously labored, but in one spot she
clearly wrote quote, he was driving in front of me
(19:49):
and stopped in the road, and a car pulled up
beside me, and he blocked the front and never came back. Still,
the new mother had no idea who had actually shot her,
and soon, under doctor's orders, she was given more medication
and went back to sleep. At a particular point, she
kind of wound down, and we were told that we
(20:10):
needed to let her rest, and obviously, based on the
fact that I told we thought she was gonna survive,
you know, there's gonna be another day. So we kind
of left it at that and moved on. As Price
spoke with Sharika eighth, he focused on the hospital waiting room.
Caruth was still there, and the sergeant wasted no time.
(20:31):
He told me that first contact is invaluable to police,
in part because lawyers aren't typically involved. Yet, if I remember,
there was another girl with him, but I'm not sure
of that. But the only thing that really I z
roe in on was he had a had a cell
phone with him, so I was asking to have take
a look his father, and uh, I started going through
some of the contacts members and uh, you know, kind
(20:53):
of writing that stuff down. Police had one crucial thing
on their side that already heard the tape from Sharika's
nine in one call. Karuth couldn't have known what she
told the dispatchers, much less that Athey had already heard it.
Tell off about the guy's line, and you can just
tell from talking to people, you know, I mean, you
got to remember what we knew at the time was
(21:14):
what Sharika said on the novel one call. I mean,
I'm not the smartest kind of the world, non playton
fairly ignorant of things. Weren't the need to so, I mean,
I kind of knew what the deal was, but he
didn't know that. I knew that the waiting room wasn't
the place for a confrontation. Though Athei's team could soon
go to work on the cell phone records, they hope
to schedule a later conversation with Caruth down at the
(21:35):
police station, but before he left the waiting room that morning.
Athey wanted one more thing from the NFL player, his car.
We got him to consent for us to search his vehicle.
He was pretty forthcoming about that because there's really no
physical evidence tying him to anything in that car, and
(21:55):
we we figured out why after we kind of got
into this thing. Any further interviews with Caruth, however, we're
quickly put on hold. Before the day was out. Caruth
had hired George Lauren, a well known Charlotte defense attorney
who had represented multiple pro athletes involved in scrapes with
the law. Lauren had no intention of letting Kruth taught
to police. George declined to let us interview his client.
(22:18):
But we go back and see what comes of the
vehicle search, which was really nothing. And the next thing
that we would have done would be start looking at
these phone records and identifying people he's been talking to
at the police station. Those records painted oblique picture thanks
largely to what was at the time cutting edge technology.
You know, we started looking into phone records because she
(22:40):
had made a comment that she was on the phone
with Ray Here's price again. So we're able to pull
her records and then we subpoena Ray's records as well,
and we were able to piece together pretty quickly that
he's talking to her from the time they left the
movie theater and then he gets off the phone to
take another phone call with this Kennedy guy. Then he
(23:01):
gets back on the phone with her. And this was
very new at the time, the cell phone triangulation, that
you could take cell phone records, figure out which towers
were being used and triangulate a location within a few yards,
and we could put Ray's cell phone where she was shot.
(23:22):
So then we started going back and talking to the
person he called in between the two Sharika calls, and
that eventually leads us to the shooter and another person
who was in the car. Four days went by and
back at the hospital there was finally caused for optimism.
(23:43):
Chancellor Lee's prognosis was gradually improving. He had a seizure
because of the hypoxia the lack of oxygen he had
had in utero. Yeah, none, for sure. It wasn't one
of the subtle ones. It was a real said, this
is Dosha Hiki again. She saw a Chancellor Lee for
the first time when he was a few hours old.
He ended up having that seizure, got some medication, and
(24:07):
that's the only time he did. Everybody was always going
to be worried about him because of what went on.
But he took a bottle. He did things like a
baby was supposed to do before he went home. Because
of the lack of oxygen. Hickey worried that Chancellor Lee
might have developed cerebral palsy, a disorder often characterized by
abnormal reflexes, stiffness in the limbs, tremors and delays, and
(24:31):
motor skills and speech development. But that diagnosis is hard
to make for infants. You were worried when he had decision.
You can't tell for sure until it's time to start
making your milestones. When you walk, when you start talking off,
when you start rolling, you know, actually if you roll
over early, that's a bad sign because it means you're stiff.
(24:53):
He was able to take a bottle, but that's a
very basic reflex. As Chancellor Lead defied doctor's expectation, however,
his mother's condition worsened, doctors proposed what was then an
experimental treatment option for Sharika called ECMO. They would put
her in a medically induced coma and use machines to
bypass the function of her heart and lungs. Sharika was
(25:17):
fighting so hard to live. She already had a punctured
lung and all her organs were just messed up, but
she was trying so hard to live. It was just
overbearing pressure on the lungs and on her heart. And
at the time the doctor did come out and tell
us that they wanted to try this new procedure and
(25:39):
it had never been done on an adult and had
only been performed with children. But they thought that they
could use this echmo and help her to live. Almost immediately, Sharika,
the five ft four woman who modeled as a teenager,
began retaining fluids and transforming before her mother's eyes. By
(26:01):
that next morning, she did not even look like Sharika,
And so when I went in to see her, I
thought I was in the wrong room. After one day,
of course, I have plenty funny stories. When up she
(26:21):
was born, she had this little round face. She had
a head full of hair, so they had put her
hair down on the sides and did a mohawk up
in the top. And I was like, they gonna gave
me the wrong child. So they assured me this, this
is the one you had. And so that first day
(26:45):
seeing her again after the coma was induced, she was
that round face the baby. She just didn't have the mohawk,
and it was such a surreal moment for me. For
nearly a month, Price visited Sharika and her family almost
(27:07):
every day to keep them updated on the investigation. By then,
a row of framed family photos lined the window sill
over hospital room, and bunches of get well Soon balloons
decorated the corners of the ceiling. They had to elevate
her bed so that it would help the drainage of
the fluids. Have one picture of me in the room
with her, with her bed probably close to six feet
(27:30):
off the ground. Here's Price again. I would have to
venture guess that every day one of the family members there,
so I got to know them super well, you know.
And during this time I wasn't just going in hospital
every day. We were doing this and doing that. And
that's including the sergeant. You know, as soon as we
bring information back to him, he would make sense of it,
(27:51):
developed new tasks, you know, trying to piece together what
had occurred at the police station. Caruth's expedition had come
up in t for DNA or other evidence tying into
the crime, but Athey had another use for it. We're
not gonna go out there knock on his door and
get him to talk to us. So we called him
on the phone and say, hey, Ray, we got your car.
(28:13):
We're kind of done with it. I said, look, if
you come down here and get this car, the media
is everywhere. You know, you have to deal with all
these jackass media people. Just no offense. I'm just trying
to to get him on our side. You know, they're
gonna be up in your face. Blah blah blah. I say, here,
what we do this. We'll come out there and get you.
We'll bring you down here. We'll get you into the
(28:33):
parking deck so you can sign a paperwork to pick
up your car. So he's all about that, and we're
buddies at that time, Athey and another officer drove out
and picked up Caruth at his home. Driving back to
the station, Athey sat in the front seat on the
passenger side and Kruth sat in the back. Always conscious
of appearances, Kruth made an observation, I've got my left
(28:55):
hand on the arm rest looking over my shoulder, kind
of just making a small talk with him and I.
At that time, I used to wear the Rolex watch
and he looks at the watch. You said, hey, is
that a fake Rolex? H I actually bought this. You
know what I mean? Well, you've just been involved. I'm
trying to murder your girlfriend, and you you want to
(29:16):
bust on me for wearing a fake Rolex. But anyway,
at the station, the sergeant stalled. Athey said the suv
wasn't quite ready to be picked up, and sent to
Ruth to an interview room to wait. There, he convinced
the football player to look at a list of his
own phone records and explain one number Ruth had called
over and over in the prior a few months. I said,
(29:37):
you know, well, the quickly we can get your store,
we can get you out of this thing and move on.
He said, we don't you know my lawyer telling I
supposed to see I understand. I said, you're not under rest.
You know you're if something happens, you're gonna be the
person something. The consequence is not your lawyer. If you've
got to go to prison, guess who ain't going to prison?
George Lauren I said, I'll tell you what. Let's just
do this. I just want you to look at some
of these phone numbers, and this tell me who these
(29:59):
people are. So he's going through, he's naming him all
right and left, and he gets down to the one
that turns out to be Van Brett Watkins and he
just gets right over that, like as quick as his
finger could move. I said, well, who's this person? And
I can't remember his response, but it clearly wasn't the truth.
So it's clear to me that number was important. That
(30:22):
phone number led to the switchboard at a budget motel
near Charlotte's Airport, the Villager Lodge, but not to a
specific room. Police released Caruth's car and sent him on
his way and puzzled over the mysterious motel guest. The
key break there came from Michael Kennedy was that the
designated place this was to happen throughout past that place
(30:45):
and then turned around and we came back. The driver
in the drive by shooting was the first to cooperate
with police. Here he is talking with Charlotte Mecklenburg police
officer Tony Rice. He can't tell you what he's gonna do.
How he's going to make this happen. Yeah, he'sat on
My man arrived at you. He was talking about well,
he said, wright with you. He said, well, we need
(31:06):
the movies. He said, I'm gonna call you and I
want out to follow me down this role right here,
and he was like we Did'm already know what to do.
Kennedy didn't know Watkins real name, but he gave police
a good description of the shooter. Nine days after Sharika
was shot, police were patrolling the Villager Lodge. Law enforcement
was close to unraveling Caruth's alleged plan, a plan that
(31:30):
soon was no longer a conspiracy to avoid a child
support payment. On December fourteenth, it became cold blooded murder.
Sharika's doctors tried experimental treatments and conventional care, but by
(31:50):
mid December she had been unconscious for twenty seven straight
days and there were a few options left. Chancellor was
still there in the hospital as well, and Sharika's family
asked if he could be brought to her room. We
knew she was going to die, and the family asked
if he could come up to the adult intensive care unit.
(32:12):
This is Hickey again, and the room was full and
there was people out in the hall and we came
in and Sandra looks up at me and goes, there's
Dr Hickey with Chancellor, and uh. We wrapped him up
and we laid him on her chest for a while.
Sharrika was never able to actually see Chancellor while she
(32:33):
was conscious. As soon as she delivered Chancellor, he had
to immediately be taken to the nick. You. There were
two occasions that we took Chancellor to her. On both
the occasions, I know she felt his presence because when
we laid Chancellor on her breast, the monitors immediately started
(32:59):
going crazy easy. That heart monitor was just all up
and down and up and down, and that let me
know she knew he was present. And I just remember
the one tier she had, one tier to come out
the side of her eye. Soon after the family decided
(33:22):
to let her go. By the time we took her
off the life support, she was two and eighty two pounds.
I didn't even have anything that she could wear. So
the last day that Sharika was Shaika to us was
(33:42):
November six. We definitely was praying for a different outcome,
that both of them would live and and get better.
But I think I had so much peace because she
was sting, she was not living, so I didn't have
(34:04):
to think long on making that decision. Uh, And I knew,
and I know she knew that her son was in
good hands, and so we made really, I made the
decision to take her off of life support. Sharika Adams
died at PM on that December day, with her parents
(34:26):
and her family by her side. Her son was four
weeks old. A few hours later, Chancellor Lee did something unexpected.
Chancellor had not had what's called an attic spell the
whole damn time since he had been in the unit
where he stopped breathing in your heart rate dropped. That
night he had an aptic spell, and all of us
(34:47):
sort of looked at each other and went, we're not
going to worry about this. It was. It was, it was.
It gave us all that. I think it was something
having to do with her passing a few hours after that,
Caruth was on the run. I'm Scott Fowlard and this
podcast is produced by Jeff Signer and Rachel Wise and
(35:10):
Davin Coburn at McClatchy Studios. Find lots more about this
case at Charlotte Observer dot com slash Caruth and for
just thirty dollars, subscribe now to a full year of
the Observer's award winning sports coverage at Charlotte Observer dot
com slash sports pass. In chapter four, The Federal Manhunt
(35:30):
for a Fugitive, I saw a segment on Good Morning America,
Ray Kruth flat the state. He could sense this was
gonna get turned on him, and him along something that horrific.
In that calculated you're just thinking, I can't my team
that could not have done that. The adrenaline kicked in.
I thought, oh my god, he is here. He comes
to the door completely naked. He's got another girl in there.
(35:51):
I said, Ray, with the FBI and I have Asians
surrounded the fall
A listener. Note this story contains adult language and some
graphic descriptions of violence. Previously on Caruth the girl and
make her board a baby. I said, I don't need
a girl. I was like, why why you wanted the gun?
(00:24):
And he was like, because she was pregnant. And at
that point that's where she decided she was going to
go ahead and stay and go on with him? How
many times? And where you file this gun. That's just
not how a murder for hire takes place. He hadn't
(00:45):
hired these people to kill Sharika Adams. The ambulance carrying
Sharika Adams raced through South Charlotte and arrived at Carolina's
Medical Center around one a m. On November six, having
suffered four gunshot wounds. The expectant mother had been bleeding
(01:07):
out in the front seat of her car, depriving her
unborn son of blood and oxygen and we're okay. Her
call had led emergency responders to her door, but time
was running out for both of them. An exact drift
(01:32):
caught in Police and medics had found her BMW full
of bullet holes outside of home in Wessex Square, owned
by Ferrell Blaylock. The next thing I know, the car
pulled across the front yard and stopped and hornsteale blowing,
the flashes flashing. Blaylock died in but here he is
the night of the shooting. Talking with local news channel
(01:52):
w b t V, she said she when she first
out in the door, she said, I've been shot and
I'm pregnant, and she identified the parson was in a
like expedition. When Sharika arrived at Carolina's Medical Center, a
trauma team was ready. Her mother, Sandra Adams, lived fairly
close by in the house where she and Sharika managed
(02:13):
to see each other almost every day, except that day
because she She's like, Mom, I've got to go and
get ridy. I gotta get my outfit just right. We're
going on a real date. Little did Sandra no when
her phone rang early that Tuesday morning, and the saga
shifted to emergency rooms, waiting rooms, and interrogation rooms. Just
(02:34):
how few days they had left from the Charlotte Observer
and McClatchy Studios. This is Caruth. I'm Scott Fowler, and
this is chapter three, Life and Death. A little after
(02:58):
one am on November six, Sandra was eating a sandwich.
Normally should have been asleep at that hour, but on
that night, her mind was racing about her single daughter
being thirty weeks pregnant, about the date Sharika was on
with Rayka Ruth, the father of her child, and about
their attempt to reconcile. Sharke and I had this little
(03:19):
private thing that we would eat fried and bologna, and
she was up any so she never wanted anybody to
know she was secretly eating fried bologna. So that night
I could not sleep. I just could not sleep, and
I had gone down to the kitchen to make me
a fried bologna sandwich. There in the kitchen, Sandra thought
(03:41):
about her daughter and traditions the women in their family
handed down through the generations. About three pops of butter
popped out and burned my hand while I was doing
the onions and bologna. And another little secret thing we
did we would always My mom had told us where
you put vanilla flavoring on it and then take the
(04:02):
burnout and won't leave a scar. So I had gone
to the cabinet to get the vanilla flavor and I
was just laughing, and I was thinking, oh, Cheika will
be saying, what are you getting ready to do? Make
a pie? So it was a little inside joke and
I finished making it. Then the phone rang um when
I answered, it was the hospital on the line, and
(04:24):
my mind immediately went to I had fallen and broken
my ankle and my instruments, hadn't finished paying all of
the bill, and they had been calling me and harassing me.
So I'm thinking, I cannot believe they are calling after
midnight about this money, and so I was very irritated
(04:50):
when they told me it was the hospital and they
were like, do you have a daughter to Sharik Adams.
I was like, yes, I do, and they were like, well,
you're daughter is at the hospital. She's been shot. And
I was like, oh no. I was like, don't play
with me. You know she's at she was on the date,
(05:11):
she was at the movie. She's not in the hospital.
And they were like, we're getting ready to take her
in to do a siscerian section to deliver her baby.
And I just remember dropping to my knees and just wailing,
just God, just please don't let my baby die. The
(05:34):
four bullets had torn into Sharika's body from her left
hand side, which had been closest to the car door
and to the shooter, Van Brett Watkins. The first bullet
entered her hip, the second her side, just below her
rib cage. The third bullet entered her upper back and
then exited higher on her right side, near her shoulder blade,
(05:57):
perhaps indicating she had begun leaning away from the gunfire.
The final bullet grazed the top of Sharika's left shoulder
and then embedded in the left side of her neck. Now,
what are your body? You shot on? The four bullets
had ripped through her pancreas, stomach, liver, lungs and other organs.
(06:20):
Thank you actually hit by the bullet, and it's remarkable
she was alive at all, and police marvel to this
day at her strength that night. Her nime on one
call is painful to listen to, and she was articulate.
She gave so much information. There's a couple of points
(06:40):
we just want to grab the dispatchers saying, come on,
I'm getting it, weren't you. This is Darryl Price of
the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Force. He's been there thirty seven
years now and has searched for hundreds of murder suspects.
He was a detective assigned to investigate the shooting. After
listening to it, you're sitting there thinking it's gonna be
one of the bravest women. She just been shot four
(07:01):
times and she's able to look at a sign to
see where she's pulling into doll and I'm won one
and give such good information in front who at the hospital.
(07:23):
Surgeons immediately went to work. She had lost a lot
of blood even though she could talk a little bit.
This is Dosha Hickey, a neo natologist and the Panthers
fan who had once met Karuth during the team's football
one on one event. She took care of Chancellor Lee
during much of his stay in the hospital and quickly
became the family's favorite doctor. She had a significant injury
(07:45):
and a lot of the injury was to the abdomen,
very near to where he was. It's it's just what
It is miraculous that he survived because Shrika was in
very bad check when she came in. And he is
Chancellor Lee born at one two am on November six,
about seventy five minutes after Sharika had been shot. He
(08:06):
was ten weeks premature and weighed only three pounds eleven ounces.
He was rushed into the neonatal I see you and
respiratory distress. But he was alive and so was Sharika.
Yet doctors feared the worst. In the minutes after Sharika
was shot, blood had poured from her wounds and Chancellor
(08:27):
had begun to suffocate Insider. Her blood pressure was down.
She was hypotensive. And you can compensate for a while.
The placenta compensates, but when it gets to a certain point,
the placenta does not get enough blood flow. When that happens,
the baby doesn't get oxygen to all the organs, but
especially the one you worry about the most is the brain. Unfortunately,
(08:49):
the brain is not an organ that can regenerate. The
liver can regenerate if there's part of it still there,
sometimes a kidney's camp, but the brain, it's not an
area that regenerates. Uh So he lost oxygen and that
causes brain damage. As doctor's race to save two lives,
Sandra raced to the hospital. She barely remembers getting there.
(09:11):
Sandra knows that at some point she made several phone calls,
including one to Sharika's father. When she arrived, she was
told she couldn't see her daughter or grandson yet, you know,
they came out and told me that they had to
revive Chancellor and uh, that he had severe damage to
(09:31):
his brain and they had him in uh the neo
natal unit, and Sharika they were trying to stabilize her
and they had told me, you know, they could not
retrieve all the bullets out of her, so they were
going to leave her open. And because so many of
(09:54):
her internal organs were affected, they didn't know what they
might need to do. So for the next of all hours,
with her daughter clinging to life on one floor and
her grandson fighting for breath on another, Sandra was helpless
in the waiting room. She hugged other relatives as they
showed up. She worried, and she prayed. Suddenly another thought
(10:16):
occurred to her. I immediately decided, oh my god, I
got a call ready, because I bet he didn't know
what's happened, you know, somehow she got shot going home
or whatever. And I'm like, I got a call him.
So I had two numbers. I had a cell phone
number and a deeper number for him, and so I
just continually just kept calling both both no answer and
(10:40):
I was leaving messages. I mean, it was some hours
had passed and he still hadn't called me back, and
I was just so concerned that he needed to know
what happened. Sandra still vividly remembers the next part of
that night. In fact, her recollection is one of the
few we have to go on. Jeff Mooney, Sharika's father,
passed away in two thousand five. Karuth declined repeated invitations
(11:04):
to be interviewed for this project or to answer questions
about Sharika's shooting. Garuth did allow his lead defense attorney,
David Rudolph, to speak on his behalf. I didn't ask
him about that in particular, and I don't remember what
he told me back nineteen years ago about what he
was doing in the in the meantime, But putting it
(11:24):
together with what I now know, uh, I think he
was panicked, Uh, you know, trying to figure out what
should I do? UH, And I think, you know, after
a number of phone calls, UM, trying to settle himself down. Uh,
he decided, you know, I need to go to the hospital.
(11:45):
But you know, and partly, you know, if you feel
sort of morally responsible for having set these wheels in
motion if you will, Um, you're gonna feel guilty. You know,
go into the hospital and there's the mother and the father.
(12:05):
So it's it's a really you know, it's one thing
if he hadn't you know, if this was really a
hit where you know, they drove by her apartment and
and killed her. Uh. And then then he goes to
the hospital. You know, there's there's not that same level
of of guilt and anxiety and panic. But here he is.
(12:26):
You know, he's had this argument with Van Brett Watkins.
You know, he backed out of this deal. He's in
that way caused us all to go down. He fled,
and now he's got to show up at the hospital.
You know, it's, um, it's it's a it's a difficult moment.
I think Sandra Adams saw that same tension, but in
(12:50):
a different way. And so you know you're hearing all
this from the doctors and and still no Ray is here. Uh.
And finally Ray comes in with another woman, and I
never forget the scene where they're sitting over there and
she's sitting in the chair and Race sitting in between
(13:10):
her legs and she's massaging raised shoulder. Because he's so tensed.
And I went over like a madwoman. I knew just
seeing that scene that he knew what happened to my baby.
And I confronted him. I let him know that I
know you know what happened to her, and you did it.
(13:35):
You did it. Sandra walked away. After a few minutes,
she approached Karruth again. Not once, you know, even before
I was a little more irate. He never showed no
emotion like how is Rika, how is the baby? Or
I do remember Jeff coming over and he was able
to talk to him more calmly and whatever. And I
(13:58):
remember going back up and I was like, what do
you even care what happened to it? Do you even
want to see your son? I mean, you haven't even
said anything about your son. Kruth said he did want
to see his son. So Sandra led him to the
Neo Natal. I see you. We were walking down to
the Neo Natal unit, and I recall him being on
the phone with his agent. I remembered that phone call.
(14:21):
I'm like, he's calling his agent and trying to get
a story together, and I'm like, m hmmm. So we
got down to the Nike you and they let us
in and Chancellor is hooked up to all these tubes
and then the incubator and everything, and so the nurse
(14:42):
was telling us, you know, we couldn't take him out,
but we could stick our finger in to touch him
or whatever. So I do remember asking him if he
wanted to touch him, and he said no, he just
wanted to get a picture of him. And he said,
because this my be the last time I get to
see him. And that just solidified it for me. I'm like,
(15:06):
you did it. Why else would you say you wouldn't
see him again if you didn't do it. On Chancellor
Lee's birth certificate, his mother's full name was listed, the
space for father was left blank. Caruth would later take
a DNA test to ensure the baby was his, but
for many it was hardly necessary. From the very beginning,
(15:27):
Chancellor Lee looked remarkably like his father, because I would
say when they were doing the DNA, but all of
us just sat there and went, he cannot deny that
this is his child. He had that same face, and
he looks just like Greig Ruth even in the beginning.
(15:51):
By eight that morning, law enforcement was arriving at the
hospital down at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department. A sergeant
named Tom Athey ran the homicide un it. He had
quickly assembled a team. We handled ma homicide. Suicide serisus
sauce about everything that's kind of high profile. So we're
very busy. So one of the guys on my squad
was called in. He worked for me, so then it
(16:12):
became my responsibility. So I didn't really know anything about it.
So I got to work next morning and kind of
come in and see all the loose trucks out back
and well, maybe you know, police officely gotten arrested, somebody
shot somebody, but gett any rate. I found out about
when I got there in the morning. Athe's retired now
living on the North Carolina coast, but at the time
(16:33):
he led the investigation, which sometimes included as many as
four detectives. Atheis sent Price to the hospital, saying he
would join him shortly. With luck, Price could speak with
the victim. She had been in surgery since early that
morning and she had just come out by the time
I got to the hospital. This is Price again. A
lot of family members were there, um, so I got
(16:55):
to meet them and talk to them a little bit
about what they knew they didn't know. They started talking
about her relationship with Ray, and at that point I
didn't have a lot of clue who Ray was. I
didn't watch Panthers football, so I wasn't a fanboy. Um.
The doctor's articulated they had delivered the baby very prematurely.
(17:19):
At that point, their prognosis was that Sharika would probably survive,
but the baby most likely would not. They right, They
really were concerned because Chancellor had to be revived. He
had literally passed away and he had to be revived,
so they were really concerned about his stability. Normally, I
(17:40):
have a difficult time with the children cases. I had
a child at the time she's now grown adult. My
child then was seven years old. But in this case,
I just remember being more focused on hoping she would
come out of her anesthesius so that we could try
to talk to her that day, because the information would
(18:02):
have been more fresh that day. About seven hours after
arriving at the hospital, Sharika was wheeled out of surgery
and into a recovery room. Her family soon joined her.
For several hours after that, Sharika was able to communicate,
but because she was intibated, the tube inserted down her
(18:22):
throat made her unable to speak, so instead she wrote.
It was one of the nurses that had made the
suggestion that she couldn't talk, but possibly she could write
here's price again, And so she was given a pad
and pen and the nurse had asked a few questions first,
and she was able to write the answers down, so
at that point started asking more questions about where she
(18:46):
had been and who she had been with, and what
had occurred to her that particular day. Through the entire ordeal,
Sharika had lost six liters of blood, one and a
half times what her body would have normally held, and
of course she had just delivered a baby, and she'd
asked for the pay it and pencil. With everything Sharika
(19:06):
had endured, Price wondered how lucid she could be. But
there was no question in Saundra's mind. I knew she
knew what she was talking about, because Serrika hated to
have chap lips, she absolutely hated, and they had these
tubes and stuff, and she was writing on the paper chapstick,
and I said, she knows exactly what she's talking about,
(19:28):
and she was able to give us enough to where
we were able to take that lead and work with it.
One of the questions I know was do you think
Ray was involved? And she just made a question mark
after that. I've seen copies of those notes, Sharika wrote.
The handwriting is obviously labored, but in one spot she
clearly wrote quote, he was driving in front of me
(19:49):
and stopped in the road, and a car pulled up
beside me, and he blocked the front and never came back. Still,
the new mother had no idea who had actually shot her,
and soon, under doctor's orders, she was given more medication
and went back to sleep. At a particular point, she
kind of wound down, and we were told that we
(20:10):
needed to let her rest, and obviously, based on the
fact that I told we thought she was gonna survive,
you know, there's gonna be another day. So we kind
of left it at that and moved on. As Price
spoke with Sharika eighth, he focused on the hospital waiting room.
Caruth was still there, and the sergeant wasted no time.
(20:31):
He told me that first contact is invaluable to police,
in part because lawyers aren't typically involved. Yet, if I remember,
there was another girl with him, but I'm not sure
of that. But the only thing that really I z
roe in on was he had a had a cell
phone with him, so I was asking to have take
a look his father, and uh, I started going through
some of the contacts members and uh, you know, kind
(20:53):
of writing that stuff down. Police had one crucial thing
on their side that already heard the tape from Sharika's
nine in one call. Karuth couldn't have known what she
told the dispatchers, much less that Athey had already heard it.
Tell off about the guy's line, and you can just
tell from talking to people, you know, I mean, you
got to remember what we knew at the time was
(21:14):
what Sharika said on the novel one call. I mean,
I'm not the smartest kind of the world, non playton
fairly ignorant of things. Weren't the need to so, I mean,
I kind of knew what the deal was, but he
didn't know that. I knew that the waiting room wasn't
the place for a confrontation. Though Athei's team could soon
go to work on the cell phone records, they hope
to schedule a later conversation with Caruth down at the
(21:35):
police station, but before he left the waiting room that morning.
Athey wanted one more thing from the NFL player, his car.
We got him to consent for us to search his vehicle.
He was pretty forthcoming about that because there's really no
physical evidence tying him to anything in that car, and
(21:55):
we we figured out why after we kind of got
into this thing. Any further interviews with Caruth, however, we're
quickly put on hold. Before the day was out. Caruth
had hired George Lauren, a well known Charlotte defense attorney
who had represented multiple pro athletes involved in scrapes with
the law. Lauren had no intention of letting Kruth taught
to police. George declined to let us interview his client.
(22:18):
But we go back and see what comes of the
vehicle search, which was really nothing. And the next thing
that we would have done would be start looking at
these phone records and identifying people he's been talking to
at the police station. Those records painted oblique picture thanks
largely to what was at the time cutting edge technology.
You know, we started looking into phone records because she
(22:40):
had made a comment that she was on the phone
with Ray Here's price again. So we're able to pull
her records and then we subpoena Ray's records as well,
and we were able to piece together pretty quickly that
he's talking to her from the time they left the
movie theater and then he gets off the phone to
take another phone call with this Kennedy guy. Then he
(23:01):
gets back on the phone with her. And this was
very new at the time, the cell phone triangulation, that
you could take cell phone records, figure out which towers
were being used and triangulate a location within a few yards,
and we could put Ray's cell phone where she was shot.
(23:22):
So then we started going back and talking to the
person he called in between the two Sharika calls, and
that eventually leads us to the shooter and another person
who was in the car. Four days went by and
back at the hospital there was finally caused for optimism.
(23:43):
Chancellor Lee's prognosis was gradually improving. He had a seizure
because of the hypoxia the lack of oxygen he had
had in utero. Yeah, none, for sure. It wasn't one
of the subtle ones. It was a real said, this
is Dosha Hiki again. She saw a Chancellor Lee for
the first time when he was a few hours old.
He ended up having that seizure, got some medication, and
(24:07):
that's the only time he did. Everybody was always going
to be worried about him because of what went on.
But he took a bottle. He did things like a
baby was supposed to do before he went home. Because
of the lack of oxygen. Hickey worried that Chancellor Lee
might have developed cerebral palsy, a disorder often characterized by
abnormal reflexes, stiffness in the limbs, tremors and delays, and
(24:31):
motor skills and speech development. But that diagnosis is hard
to make for infants. You were worried when he had decision.
You can't tell for sure until it's time to start
making your milestones. When you walk, when you start talking off,
when you start rolling, you know, actually if you roll
over early, that's a bad sign because it means you're stiff.
(24:53):
He was able to take a bottle, but that's a
very basic reflex. As Chancellor Lead defied doctor's expectation, however,
his mother's condition worsened, doctors proposed what was then an
experimental treatment option for Sharika called ECMO. They would put
her in a medically induced coma and use machines to
bypass the function of her heart and lungs. Sharika was
(25:17):
fighting so hard to live. She already had a punctured
lung and all her organs were just messed up, but
she was trying so hard to live. It was just
overbearing pressure on the lungs and on her heart. And
at the time the doctor did come out and tell
us that they wanted to try this new procedure and
(25:39):
it had never been done on an adult and had
only been performed with children. But they thought that they
could use this echmo and help her to live. Almost immediately, Sharika,
the five ft four woman who modeled as a teenager,
began retaining fluids and transforming before her mother's eyes. By
(26:01):
that next morning, she did not even look like Sharika,
And so when I went in to see her, I
thought I was in the wrong room. After one day,
of course, I have plenty funny stories. When up she
(26:21):
was born, she had this little round face. She had
a head full of hair, so they had put her
hair down on the sides and did a mohawk up
in the top. And I was like, they gonna gave
me the wrong child. So they assured me this, this
is the one you had. And so that first day
(26:45):
seeing her again after the coma was induced, she was
that round face the baby. She just didn't have the mohawk,
and it was such a surreal moment for me. For
nearly a month, Price visited Sharika and her family almost
(27:07):
every day to keep them updated on the investigation. By then,
a row of framed family photos lined the window sill
over hospital room, and bunches of get well Soon balloons
decorated the corners of the ceiling. They had to elevate
her bed so that it would help the drainage of
the fluids. Have one picture of me in the room
with her, with her bed probably close to six feet
(27:30):
off the ground. Here's Price again. I would have to
venture guess that every day one of the family members there,
so I got to know them super well, you know.
And during this time I wasn't just going in hospital
every day. We were doing this and doing that. And
that's including the sergeant. You know, as soon as we
bring information back to him, he would make sense of it,
(27:51):
developed new tasks, you know, trying to piece together what
had occurred at the police station. Caruth's expedition had come
up in t for DNA or other evidence tying into
the crime, but Athey had another use for it. We're
not gonna go out there knock on his door and
get him to talk to us. So we called him
on the phone and say, hey, Ray, we got your car.
(28:13):
We're kind of done with it. I said, look, if
you come down here and get this car, the media
is everywhere. You know, you have to deal with all
these jackass media people. Just no offense. I'm just trying
to to get him on our side. You know, they're
gonna be up in your face. Blah blah blah. I say, here,
what we do this. We'll come out there and get you.
We'll bring you down here. We'll get you into the
(28:33):
parking deck so you can sign a paperwork to pick
up your car. So he's all about that, and we're
buddies at that time, Athey and another officer drove out
and picked up Caruth at his home. Driving back to
the station, Athey sat in the front seat on the
passenger side and Kruth sat in the back. Always conscious
of appearances, Kruth made an observation, I've got my left
(28:55):
hand on the arm rest looking over my shoulder, kind
of just making a small talk with him and I.
At that time, I used to wear the Rolex watch
and he looks at the watch. You said, hey, is
that a fake Rolex? H I actually bought this. You
know what I mean? Well, you've just been involved. I'm
trying to murder your girlfriend, and you you want to
(29:16):
bust on me for wearing a fake Rolex. But anyway,
at the station, the sergeant stalled. Athey said the suv
wasn't quite ready to be picked up, and sent to
Ruth to an interview room to wait. There, he convinced
the football player to look at a list of his
own phone records and explain one number Ruth had called
over and over in the prior a few months. I said,
(29:37):
you know, well, the quickly we can get your store,
we can get you out of this thing and move on.
He said, we don't you know my lawyer telling I
supposed to see I understand. I said, you're not under rest.
You know you're if something happens, you're gonna be the
person something. The consequence is not your lawyer. If you've
got to go to prison, guess who ain't going to prison?
George Lauren I said, I'll tell you what. Let's just
do this. I just want you to look at some
of these phone numbers, and this tell me who these
(29:59):
people are. So he's going through, he's naming him all
right and left, and he gets down to the one
that turns out to be Van Brett Watkins and he
just gets right over that, like as quick as his
finger could move. I said, well, who's this person? And
I can't remember his response, but it clearly wasn't the truth.
So it's clear to me that number was important. That
(30:22):
phone number led to the switchboard at a budget motel
near Charlotte's Airport, the Villager Lodge, but not to a
specific room. Police released Caruth's car and sent him on
his way and puzzled over the mysterious motel guest. The
key break there came from Michael Kennedy was that the
designated place this was to happen throughout past that place
(30:45):
and then turned around and we came back. The driver
in the drive by shooting was the first to cooperate
with police. Here he is talking with Charlotte Mecklenburg police
officer Tony Rice. He can't tell you what he's gonna do.
How he's going to make this happen. Yeah, he'sat on
My man arrived at you. He was talking about well,
he said, wright with you. He said, well, we need
(31:06):
the movies. He said, I'm gonna call you and I
want out to follow me down this role right here,
and he was like we Did'm already know what to do.
Kennedy didn't know Watkins real name, but he gave police
a good description of the shooter. Nine days after Sharika
was shot, police were patrolling the Villager Lodge. Law enforcement
was close to unraveling Caruth's alleged plan, a plan that
(31:30):
soon was no longer a conspiracy to avoid a child
support payment. On December fourteenth, it became cold blooded murder.
Sharika's doctors tried experimental treatments and conventional care, but by
(31:50):
mid December she had been unconscious for twenty seven straight
days and there were a few options left. Chancellor was
still there in the hospital as well, and Sharika's family
asked if he could be brought to her room. We
knew she was going to die, and the family asked
if he could come up to the adult intensive care unit.
(32:12):
This is Hickey again, and the room was full and
there was people out in the hall and we came
in and Sandra looks up at me and goes, there's
Dr Hickey with Chancellor, and uh. We wrapped him up
and we laid him on her chest for a while.
Sharrika was never able to actually see Chancellor while she
(32:33):
was conscious. As soon as she delivered Chancellor, he had
to immediately be taken to the nick. You. There were
two occasions that we took Chancellor to her. On both
the occasions, I know she felt his presence because when
we laid Chancellor on her breast, the monitors immediately started
(32:59):
going crazy easy. That heart monitor was just all up
and down and up and down, and that let me
know she knew he was present. And I just remember
the one tier she had, one tier to come out
the side of her eye. Soon after the family decided
(33:22):
to let her go. By the time we took her
off the life support, she was two and eighty two pounds.
I didn't even have anything that she could wear. So
the last day that Sharika was Shaika to us was
(33:42):
November six. We definitely was praying for a different outcome,
that both of them would live and and get better.
But I think I had so much peace because she
was sting, she was not living, so I didn't have
(34:04):
to think long on making that decision. Uh, And I knew,
and I know she knew that her son was in
good hands, and so we made really, I made the
decision to take her off of life support. Sharika Adams
died at PM on that December day, with her parents
(34:26):
and her family by her side. Her son was four
weeks old. A few hours later, Chancellor Lee did something unexpected.
Chancellor had not had what's called an attic spell the
whole damn time since he had been in the unit
where he stopped breathing in your heart rate dropped. That
night he had an aptic spell, and all of us
(34:47):
sort of looked at each other and went, we're not
going to worry about this. It was. It was, it was.
It gave us all that. I think it was something
having to do with her passing a few hours after that,
Caruth was on the run. I'm Scott Fowlard and this
podcast is produced by Jeff Signer and Rachel Wise and
(35:10):
Davin Coburn at McClatchy Studios. Find lots more about this
case at Charlotte Observer dot com slash Caruth and for
just thirty dollars, subscribe now to a full year of
the Observer's award winning sports coverage at Charlotte Observer dot
com slash sports pass. In chapter four, The Federal Manhunt
(35:30):
for a Fugitive, I saw a segment on Good Morning America,
Ray Kruth flat the state. He could sense this was
gonna get turned on him, and him along something that horrific.
In that calculated you're just thinking, I can't my team
that could not have done that. The adrenaline kicked in.
I thought, oh my god, he is here. He comes
to the door completely naked. He's got another girl in there.
(35:51):
I said, Ray, with the FBI and I have Asians
surrounded the fall
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