“Booby’s dead. ”
Those words hit me like a physical blow. My brother never called me first—he always texted. So when I heard his voice shaking on the other end of the line, I knew something was terribly wrong.
“Stop playing,” I said. “That’s not funny. ”
But he was sobbing too hard to joke. And that’s when my world collapsed.
Adam was the youngest of us four brothers, the one everybody loved. We called him Booby because he had dimples and long hair as a baby, and women would pick him up, and he just loved boobies. The name stuck his whole life. He was the one everyone wanted to be around, the charming one who could say the same words I said and get completely different results.
He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. If someone wronged him, he’d forgive them and somehow turn an enemy into a friend. That was just who he was. We grew up in a small country town, raised by our single mom.
She moved us out to the country to give us a better life, away from the drug-dealing lifestyle that had claimed other family members. She kept six boys in line all by herself. Her favorite saying was, “I don’t care how old you are. I brought you in this world, I’ll take you out.
” She kept us all in check. Adam became a father at 22. He lived for that little girl. When she came along, nothing else mattered to him.
He was the first of us to have kids, and he actually showed me how to treat my own daughters. I was so proud to watch him be a dad. In 2016, Adam had recently broken up with his long-term partner. He was working as a driver for a roofing company and picking up extra shifts at a gas station.
Between work and his daughter, he didn’t have time to meet people the old-fashioned way. So I showed him the Plenty of Fish dating app. I always told him to be careful. But he was just so trusting.
He didn’t see evil in anyone. He thought everyone was friendly, everyone could be his friend. On August 18th, Adam started texting a match on the app. Her name was Haley.
They arranged to meet that same night at a bowling alley—the same one we used to go to as kids. He picked her up from an apartment complex, brought her back to his place real quick, and then took her to a city called Wanita so she could shower and change. He treated her like a queen that night. He told her to get whatever she wanted at the bowling alley, made sure she was comfortable.
They had their date, went back to his apartment, had a couple more drinks. He had to work the next day, so he dropped her off and went home to sleep. But in the early hours of Friday morning, Adam’s phone pinged. It was Haley, asking if she could come back over.
He opened the door. Instead of Haley, he was met by two armed attackers. The roommate who discovered him said he saw the front door standing open. He walked in thinking, “Dang, we’ve been robbed,” because the TV was gone.
Then he went to the bedroom and found our brother face down in his own blood. Adam had been forced onto his knees and shot in the back of the head. The bullet exited through his cheek. He was found in a pool of blood, with a knife wound from an attempt to slice his throat that hadn’t quite worked.
They’d tied him up with a Wi-Fi power cord. He begged them. He told them, “I got a 5-year-old daughter. Don’t kill me.
Take everything. Take my car. Take everything I have. ”
They laughed about it.
And they killed him anyway. I got the call from my brother Angel. I kept telling him to stop playing, that it wasn’t funny. But it was real.
My baby boy was gone. We had his visitation at the apartment where it happened. The landlord let us have it there because we felt like his spirit would still be there. Two or three hundred people showed up.
My mom spent hours cleaning her son’s blood off the floor of his own apartment, and I still can’t imagine having to do that. I remember walking into a room, turning off all the lights, and just sitting in the closet. I sat there for like 15 minutes saying, “Bro, come talk to me. Just come talk to me.
” I waited to see if he’d show up. He never did. The police worked around the clock. They learned Adam had gone on a date on Thursday night with a young Hispanic female he’d met on Plenty of Fish.
They got a lucky break when some detectives investigating an unrelated burglary went to question Haley about a theft in Winter Haven. As they pulled up to her house, a white car sped away. They followed the lead and found a white Kia near the apartment behind the Walmart. Two guys got in and drove off.
Police stopped them and saw baseball hats in the back seat—the same hats Adam wore in pictures from our investigation. Andre Warner was driving. He was already on felony probation for a crime in Georgia where a police officer was shot after a robbery. The passenger was Gary Gray.
The woman who identified the hats was absolutely positive. They belonged to Adam. They arrested Haley too. She’d been violating probation by staying at a house that was known as a haven for gangs and drug activity.
When they brought her in for questioning, she spilled her guts. What she revealed was horrifying. The date with Adam was a setup. A woman had told Haley she could make money on Plenty of Fish by setting up fake profiles, going on dates, finding easy targets, and robbing them.
Haley was supposed to scope out Adam’s apartment, report back what he had, and then they’d go back to steal it. Haley was just 18. She’d just turned 18 in July. Adam was murdered in August.
She wanted so badly to fit in with these people that she did whatever they told her to do. I’ve already forgiven her. I don’t hold anything against her. She’d lived such a hard life and just wanted to be accepted.
But I don’t think she ever imagined in a million years that Adam would be killed. The plan was simple. Joshua Ellington drove Andre’s car. Haley rode along, along with Gary Gray and Andre Warner.
They went back to Adam’s apartment. Gary Gray went in first and tried to slice Adam’s neck, but the knife wasn’t sharp enough. There was a struggle. They tied him up with a Wi-Fi cord.
Adam cried so much he vomited. He begged for his life, thinking of his little girl, not wanting to leave her without a daddy. And as they were leaving, Andre shot him in the back of the head. He ran out of the house last, the one with no emotion, no sympathy, no regret.
He just didn’t care. One of the suspects supposedly said they decided to kill Adam because they weren’t wearing face masks. They weren’t covered up. So instead of letting him live, they took his life.
A life worth so much more than the few things they stole. Andre Warner was the only one who went to trial. The other three took plea deals. I went to court every single day, even though it was hard.
I had to be there for my son, to make sure they knew he was a human being. I had to represent him. I wanted him to get justice. Every day the courtroom was packed.
Andre’s family sat on one side. The rest of the room was there for my brother. It was a strange thing to come face to face with the person who took a family member from you, but I knew I had to stand up for my brother, to show Andre that no matter what he did, we would still stand. The jury deliberated for nearly three hours and returned a unanimous verdict: death.
But the judge overruled it and sentenced Andre Warner to life in prison. He’ll spend the rest of his days behind bars, living with the weight of what he did. Haley was sentenced to 15 years. Joshua Ellington got 25.
Gary Gray got 43. As for me, I found something I didn’t expect to find: forgiveness. When Gary Gray was sentenced, he asked to speak to me in the courtroom. He told me he was sorry.
I gave him a hug. That’s just who I am. My legacy from Adam is love. The love he had for everyone, the way he helped people.
I forgive Haley, Andre, Gary, and Joshua because I know Adam would have forgiven them. He would have found a way to forgive even the people who took his life. People came to me after he died, telling me things about him I couldn’t even imagine. I’d say, “My baby was like that?
” And they’d say, “Yes, he was special. Very special. ”
God gave me that gift for 27 years. And I’m grateful for every single one of them.
But I lost my best friend. I lost the person I could tell anything to without judgment. And I honestly haven’t been the same person since. There’s a big part of me that’s missing—a very big part of my life.
Adam’s little girl lost her father because some people thought his stuff was worth more than his life. And no sentence, no punishment, will ever bring him back.
