Carruth shames Tarheel state

I am usually so proud to be a Tarheel. Every time the men's basketball team manages to blow it in the second half, I am the first to remind every Hoosier the Heels are No. 6 in the polls. \nEvery time Vince Carter dunks or Michael Jordan's face graces the cover of a magazine, I remind everyone where they started. And when Bobby Knight was finally fired, I had to remind everyone how wonderful Dean Smith was, and he didn't throw chairs. \nBut now, I can't lie; I am embarrassed to be a Tarheel. The Heels are still No. 6 in the polls and MJ is still the greatest, but Rae Carruth has killed my Tarheel pride. \nCarruth's tale is a story of a scared, sick man hurting a woman with whom he was once intimate because he didn't have the heart or sense of responsibility to provide for the child he was bringing into the world. \nCarruth, formerly a member of the Carolina Panthers, has been convicted of conspiracy for setting up an attack on Cherica Adams, a woman who was pregnant with his child. \nThe reason? He didn't want to pay child support. The millions of dollars he made as an NFL player just weren't enough for this child, the "mistake" that belonged to him.\nThe plan was that Carruth, whom Adams still trusted, would use his white Ford Expedition to block Adams' car on a lonely Charlotte highway so a hired gunman could shoot the 24-year-old woman.\nThe child, named Chancellor by his grandmother, survived through an emergency caesarean section. Adams was not so lucky. She died from wounds inflicted by the four bullets shot through the window of her car.\nCarruth's sentence: almost 19 years minimum, 24 years max. That is all the jury gave him for his conspiracy to commit murder. The most time Carruth could spend in jail is a year for every year Adams was alive. As if the prison time could ever be enough for the family and friends of Adams or for Chancellor, a child whose only living parent wanted him dead.\nLives are lost each and every day; even people in the smallest towns in the Tarheel state know that. Guns are shot, murders occur and the cycle of life continues. Fair or not, that is the way it goes. But somehow the murder of a woman for being pregnant seems especially twisted.\nCarruth will get out of prison. NFL days long over, he will probably still be able to live off his millions. But then what? Will he ever be brave enough to look into the eyes of the child he tried to kill and explain to him where his mother is? Will Carruth be man enough to explain to his child why life was so hopeless he wanted to kill him?\nMaybe he will tell him it was because, as a former NFL player, he thought he was above the law. Maybe he thought he could take any life into his own hands and do as he pleased. Maybe he will beg the child for forgiveness.\nAnother family is broken, another life lost.\nI am not proud to be from a place where a person had the mentality to conspire to kill his child. I am not proud that these athletes are the role models for the children who fill the stadium in Charlotte on Sunday afternoons. \nI am scared. I am scared for my brother, who defends Rae Carruth because of his admiration for him.\nI am scared of the hours he spends glued to the TV screen, hoping to be like the man who might feel so much pressure that he thinks doing the wrong thing is the only way out. Most of all, I am scared that one day I might be surrounded by the mentality that there is never a right way out. \nAcross Tarheel land, Hoosier land and the entire world, the lives that are taken every day make me scared and ashamed. I am ashamed Carruth had to conspire to kill to find a way out. And I am ashamed that many times, although to a much lesser degree, I am a Tarheel who follows his path, making the wrong decisions, not taking responsibility and lazily refusing to take that infamous path less traveled -- that path is the only right way out.