Instant Fame

Even as a toddler, Rae Carruth knew he was destined for greatness on the football field. Theodry Carruth remembers a picture her son drew of himself standing by a goalpost, “as though he had made a touchdown.”

“It goes as far back as when he was 3, and we used to have to put ‘Rae Carruth No. 1’ on his T-shirts,” she says with a laugh.

In 1995, two years before he would become the Carolina Panthers’ first-round pick in the NFL draft, the wide receiver from Sacramento made his goals clear. “No matter what I do,” said Carruth, then playing at Colorado, “I’ve decided I want to be famous.”

He has achieved that fame, but not in the way he planned.

On Tuesday, Carruth, 25, was charged with first-degree murder in the Nov. 16 drive-by shooting of his pregnant girlfriend, Cherica Adams. Adams, 24, died Tuesday of her wounds in the same hospital where her son, Chancellor, delivered by emergency caesarean section 10 weeks prematurely, remains in fair condition.

Carruth is accused of masterminding the attack with three other men--Michael E. Kennedy, 24; Stanley D. Abraham, 19; and William E. Watkins, 44. All were initially charged with conspiracy and attempted murder.

All are now jailed without bond. Carruth was arrested late Wednesday in western Tennessee, hiding in the trunk of a woman friend’s car. He had been free after securing a $3-million bond by putting up his mother’s house and his own as collateral. When Adams died, bond was revoked and he fled, launching a national manhunt.

The four now face the death penalty if convicted, prosecutors have said.

As Carruth awaits trial, friends and relatives wonder how an up-and-coming athlete who seemed to love kids could possibly be involved in something so heinous.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me. He has too much going for him,” says Dave Hoskins, who coached Carruth at Sacramento’s Valley High.

Carruth’s was a Cinderella story.

He and his younger sister, Samel, grew up in the drug- and crime-ridden streets of Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood. Their parents split in 1988, when Rae was 14.

Many inner-city kids see sports as a ticket out, and Theodry Carruth says people told her early on that her son was “a natural.”

Hoskins remembers the first time he saw Carruth. The coach was conditioning his new charges. “I just saw this guy flying around the track and I went, ‘Hoooooly God! Who is that?’ ” he says. “And they said, ‘That’s a sophomore, Rae Carruth.’ . . . . And [I] just said, ‘Well, he’s not going to play with the sophomores.’ ”

Carruth was breaking all kinds of records on the gridiron, but he was barely making the 2.0 grade-point average required to play. Under NCAA eligibility rules, his grades would keep him from a college scholarship, and Hoskins and school counselors urged him to retake several classes. He did, and by the end of his senior year, his GPA was above 3.0.

“You know, it’s kind of humiliating for a senior to sit in classes with freshmen and sophomores and retake those classes, but he did it,” Hoskins says. “I thought that took a lot of courage on his part.”

The 5-foot-11, 195-pound Carruth got a scholarship to Colorado, where he was a unanimous All-Big Eight choice in 1995, when he caught 53 passes for 1,008 yards and nine touchdowns. His senior year, he had 54 catches for 1,116 yards and eight touchdowns.

Carruth was the 27th overall pick in the 1997 NFL draft. When he joined the Panthers, he got a $1-million signing bonus.

His life changed overnight.

“People that you hadn’t seen in years began to pop out of the woodwork,” says his mother, Theodry Carruth, a social worker still living in Sacramento. “Everybody knew you; everybody wanted to be your friend. It was just bad. Bad.”

But Carruth seemed determined to share his blessings. He paid off his mother’s home and assisted other relatives financially.

When Tony Bouler, who worked with Theodry Carruth at a hotel, asked if her son might help provide Christmas presents for two dozen children at his Charlotte church last year, Carruth came through with 50 toys. “I’m like, ‘Whoa! Thank you. Thank the NFL. Thank everybody,’ ” says Bouler.

Friends say Carruth wanted very much to be a mentor to kids.

Marcia Williams says whenever he returned to Sacramento, he would stop by to play video games and compare football scars with her 14-year-old son, Shaun. In Colorado, he befriended a young deaf boy. In Charlotte, he volunteered to coach a baseball team.

And last year, Hoskins says Carruth’s agent called him out of the blue and asked him for help on a charitable project.

“Rae wanted to set up a home for kids that had no place to go, maybe like parents had died and the kids were out in the street,” Hoskins recalls. “And he asked me to contact an attorney to set it up legally so that nobody would benefit from it but just the kids that were down and out.”

When Carruth was picked up by the Panthers, his mother told him to “find a nice Southern girl who can be your wife.” For a while, it looked as if Cherica Adams might be that girl.

Carruth met Adams about a year ago at a party thrown by another football player, says her mother, Saundra Adams.

Nicknamed “Cookie” because of a childhood fondness for sweets, Adams was described as bright and outgoing. At West Charlotte High, she was involved in Students Against Violence Everywhere and danced at sporting events with a group called the Letter Girls.

She modeled professionally while still in high school, says her cousin, Kia Miller. She baby-sat for Dell Curry and Muggsy Bogues of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets, and even interned with the Panthers.

Adams attended Winston-Salem State for about a year before dropping out to pursue a job in real estate, her mother says. She also started a company, Summertime Entertainment, and was managing her brother’s rap group, Dead Poetz.

Saundra Adams says her daughter would write “inspirational, spiritually affirming” notes to herself and stick them on the mirror. They attended motivational speeches together.

“She was all about being her best,” she says.

When Adams learned she was pregnant, even though it was unplanned, she was ecstatic. When she learned it was going to be a boy, she mulled over strong names before deciding on Chancellor, “because of its regalness, and it kind of exudes a thought of power and ruling, taking charge,” her mother says.

Theodry Carruth says her son never mentioned Adams or a baby, but Virginia Adams says the player seemed initially to share her granddaughter’s enthusiasm.

“He was happy, yep--at the beginning,” says Virginia Adams, who reared Cherica until the age of 12. “And [he] went with her to the doctor every time she went. . . .”

Saundra Adams says Carruth asked early on if Adams wanted to have an abortion, but then seemed to look forward to the birth. Then things started to go sour.

After leading all rookies in 1997 with 44 receptions and four touchdowns, Carruth was dogged by injuries. He suffered a broken bone in his foot during the 1998 season opener. This season, after playing in only five games, he suffered a sprained ankle Oct. 17.

Saundra Adams says that’s about the time he seemed to lose interest in the baby. He stopped going to doctor visits.

“He seemed to be more pressured after his injury,” Saundra Adams says. “More pressured about money and how much the baby was going to cost him.”

In fact, three years into a four-year, $3.7-million contract, Carruth’s financial situation was anything but rosy.

A couple filed suit against him, claiming he backed out of a $224,000 home purchase (he’s still paying on another house). He was among investors who lost money in an alleged nationwide pyramid scheme involving car title loans in South Carolina.

And Carruth settled a 1994 paternity lawsuit brought by a Sacramento woman, agreeing to pay $3,500 a month to support a 5-year-old son.

But Theodry Carruth says her son wasn’t letting his problems get the best of him. Even after the game in which he injured himself, he seemed upbeat.

“He said, ‘I’ll be back,’ and we really thought he’d be back in the game that following week,” she says.

She says Carruth, an English major who favored the works of authors Alex Haley and James Baldwin, was even talking about finishing the last semester he needed for his bachelor’s degree. After football, he planned to write books and screenplays, maybe even teach.

“He said he finally was comfortable,” she says. “I felt like he was doing OK.”

Until the shooting, that is.

According to prosecutors, Kennedy was driving a vehicle carrying Watkins and Abraham, while Carruth was driving his truck in front of Adams’ black BMW and communicating with Kennedy’s vehicle by cell phone. When Carruth slowed down, prosecutors allege, Watkins opened fire with a pistol, striking Adams four times in the neck and chest.

Prosecutors say Adams called 911 after she was shot. Police interviewed her from her hospital bed, and they say she provided helpful information. They would not give details.

Chancellor, who wasn’t due until Jan. 16, remains in the hospital in fair condition. Police have not discussed a possible motive.

There is evidence of what brought the football star together with his co-defendants.

Watkins did auto detailing and odd jobs for Carruth, who sometimes paged him on a beeper. Kennedy apparently knew Watkins from a rim shop both frequented, and Abraham grew up in the same neighborhood as Kennedy.

Kennedy has an arrest history dating to 1994 and including a charge of assault with intent to kill. His most recent guilty plea was in April, to a South Carolina charge of illegal possession of a 9-mm pistol.

During a bond hearing, Assistant District Attorney Jack Knight said Watkins had a record in Queens, N.Y., dating to 1983, including charges of assault, larceny and attempted possession of a weapon. Knight declined to elaborate, and court officials in Queens could find no records matching Watkins.

Watkins, whose nickname is “New York,” split his time between Charlotte and Atlanta, where he worked as a bouncer at a strip club called Jazzy T’s, says his girlfriend, Bridgett Stinson.

When he was in Charlotte, Watkins rented a $138-a-week double room at the Villager Lodge--a rundown motel directly beneath the path of incoming jets at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport.

Stinson describes Watkins as a caring person who treated her 2-year-old son, Jakari, like his own--changing his diapers and even taking him for his first haircut.

“Maybe there was a part that I didn’t know of him,” she says.

Attorney James Gronquist says he doesn’t know why Abraham was charged. He still lives with his parents in a quiet middle-class neighborhood where the roads have speed bumps. He was working steadily through a temp agency and was planning on going to community college to study computers, Gronquist says.

“He was merely present,” the attorney says.

Carruth swears he had nothing to do with the shooting.

“He just said, ‘Mom, I didn’t do it.’ That’s what I needed to hear,” Theodry Carruth says. “I know Rae didn’t do this. Mothers know.”

Regardless of whether he was involved, Carruth’s NFL career appears to be over.

On Wednesday, the Panthers cleared out his locker at Ericsson Stadium and removed his nearby picture to make way for another player. The team cut him loose the next day.

Meanwhile, a maintenance crew was busy cleaning Cherica Adams’ townhouse apartment for the next tenant.

Saundra Adams, who has been granted emergency custody of Chancellor, says her daughter always dreamed of having a home by the water. She will rest in a plot overlooking a cemetery lake.