Former Carolina Panthers wide receiver Rae Carruth was released from prison Monday, nearly 19 years after masterminding the murder of his pregnant girlfriend, Cherica Adams.
Carruth, 44, was released from a minimum-security facility at Sampson Correctional Institution in Clinton, North Carolina, where roughly a dozen news trucks and throngs of reporters awaited the former NFL first-round pick’s release, the Charlotte Observer reports.
Carruth did not speak to reporters before getting into a waiting white Chevy Tahoe. It’s unclear where he was headed or who picked him up. He must now regularly meet with authorities throughout the next nine months as part of his post-release conditions, according to the newspaper.
Carruth was convicted by a jury in January 2001 of hiring a hitman to kill 24-year-old Adams, who was seven months pregnant with Carruth’s child at the time. Police said Carruth, the Panthers’ first-round pick in 1997, concocted the plot to kill Adams to get out of child support. The couple’s son was later born via an emergency cesarean section and has since been raised by his grandmother.
In March, Carruth reneged on a pledge to reconnect with his now-18-year-old son, Chancellor Lee Adams — who was born with cerebral palsy — upon his release from prison because leaving him alone is in “everyone’s best interest,” he told the Charlotte Observer.
Adams will turn 19 next month and has lived with his maternal grandmother, Saundra Adams, in Charlotte. In 2016, Saundra Adams told the newspaper she planned to meet Carruth with Chancellor at the prison gates upon his release, but both of them changed their minds in recent months.
“We’re not going,” Saundra Adams told the newspaper Sunday.
In 2003, Saundra Adams was awarded nearly $5.8 million in damages in a wrongful death lawsuit, but she said she’s received hardly any money from that judgment since the four men convicted in the plot have been imprisoned or unemployed since that time.
Carruth told WSOC by phone last week that he “just truly” wants to be forgiven for the 1999 killing.
“I’m excited about just being out there,” he told the station. “I’m nervous just about how I’ll be received by the public. 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.”
Carruth told the Charlotte Observer in a four-page, 800-word letter that he had become a barber behind bars, earning roughly a dollar per day after cashing game checks averaging nearly $40,000 during his playing years in the late 1990s. He was the first active NFL player at the time to be charged with and convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, according to ESPN.
The man who shot Cherica Adams, Van Brett Watkins, was hired by Carruth and was sentenced to serve a minimum of 40 years behind bars. He’s scheduled to be released from prison in 2046 after taking a second-degree murder plea in 2001. A friend of Carruth’s named Michael Kennedy — who drove a third car behind Carruth and Cherica Adams — as well as a passenger in that car, Stanley Abraham, have since been released from prison, according to the Observer.