Kennedy Tells of Threat

One of Rae Carruth’s co-defendants said the former football player asked him to help find a car and a gun so he could kill his pregnant girlfriend, then threatened his life when he hesitated.

Michael Eugene Kennedy, 25, charged with driving the car from which Cherica Adams was shot, testified Tuesday in Carruth’s murder trial--without a plea agreement and against his attorneys’ wishes.

He said Carruth asked him where he could buy a gun because he had gotten a woman pregnant.

“He was saying that she was trying to juice him for the money,” he said.

Kennedy testified that Carruth, at the time a member of the Carolina Panthers, said he was paying $5,000 a month to support one child from a previous relationship and did not want to spend another $5,000 a month on a second.

Kennedy said he told Carruth he did not want to help him find a gun or let him use his rented car for the shooting.

“I said I didn’t want nothing to do with it,” Kennedy said. “He said I already did because I knew about it and if I didn’t help, I would be next. I smiled like he was joking, and he looked at me serious, like he wasn’t. It was an iron-faced look.”

Carruth, 26, faces the death penalty if convicted of arranging Adams’ November 1999 shooting. Adams, 24, died about a month later, after giving birth to their son.

The defense claims another man, Van Brett Watkins, shot Adams in anger because Carruth reneged on a promise to pay for drugs and because she made an obscene gesture at him from her car.

Watkins, 40, has confessed to the shooting and agreed to testify against Carruth. Kennedy and a fourth man, Stanley Drew “Boss” Abraham, a passenger in Kennedy’s car, are to be tried later on murder charges.

Earlier Tuesday, a man who called police to help the bleeding Adams insisted that she identified Carruth as the man who shot her.

Farrell Blalock was in his home when Adams was shot and drove onto his lawn. He called police and came outside when they arrived.

Blalock testified Adams told officers: “ ‘I’m pregnant and I’ve been shot.’ And the policeman said, ‘Who did it?’ And she said, ‘My husband, I mean, my boyfriend.’

“And I heard her say he was driving a white Ford Expedition. And she said she had been to a movie.”

Defense attorney David Rudolf tried to get Blalock to say Adams could have meant Carruth was driving the Expedition, but he insisted she identified him as the gunman.