Who is Phillip Adams? Learn more about the former NFL player who is suspected of fatally shooting five people before dying by suicide.
Retired NFL player Phillip Adams is suspected of fatally shooting five people — one of them being the well-known Dr. Robert Lesslie — according to his father, Alonzo Adams, and local authorities. The shooting took place inside Lesslie’s home in York County, South Carolina on April 7; Lesslie’s wife Barbara,69, their grandchildren Adah,9, and Noah,5, and someone named James Lewis,38 (who was working inside the home) also died amid the shooting. A sixth person — Robert Shook,38 — survived the shooting and is now “fighting hard for his life,” the victim’s cousin reported, per ESPN. After the tragedy, Adams fled to the home of his parents — who were evacuated — where he eventually died by suicide from a self-inflected gun wound in the early morning of Thursday, April 8, according the outlet. Phillip Adams, who played for five famous NFL teams between 2010-2015, is pictured above. [Shutterstock] “There’s nothing right now that makes sense to any of us,” York County Sheriff Kevin Tolson said at a news conference on April 8, per ESPN. Investigators are still looking for a motive in this mass shooting. Adams’ relationship to the Lesslie family is also not known at the time; the sheriff clarified that there was no “doctor-patient relationship” between Adams and Dr. Lesslie, a longtime emergency room doctor and the founder of Riverview Hospice and Palliative Care.
