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  • A Foundering Football Star Killed a Family. No One Knows Why.

    He struggled to find work. His last-ditch chance to make an NFL team fizzled. He had a child to support and little apparent direction in a life freighted with high expectations. His behavior was increasingly erratic. Then Wednesday, for reasons no one yet knows for sure, Phillip Adams, a former NFL cornerback, went to the Rock Hill, South Carolina, home of a prominent doctor and shot everybody he saw before fatally turning the gun on himself. Now, the football-loving community of 65,000 that bills itself as Football City USA is struggling to contend with Adams’ suddenly violent turn and its aftermath. Before he killed five people, including two children, and critically wounded a sixth person, Adams, 32, who shot and killed himself several hours after his rampage, had seemed adrift since he last played NFL football almost six years ago, friends and associates said. He remained close to home, caring for his mother, Phyllis, a former high school teacher who became a paraplegic after a car accident a decade ago. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times But for all the pressures on Adams — and family members are openly questioning whether football damaged his brain — the many people who rooted for him throughout his career are grappling with the loss of Dr. Robert Lesslie and his family at the hands of a local son. “He was the role model that all coaches hoped they could coach,” said Jim Montgomery, who coached Adams in football at Rock Hill High School, the alma mater of numerous NFL players. Montgomery said he had spent most of Thursday answering phone calls through tears. Authorities said that Adams had fatally shot Lesslie; his wife, Barbara; and two of their grandchildren, Adah Lesslie, 9, and Noah Lesslie, 5. James Lewis, 38, had been working on their home when he was killed, and a sixth victim, Robert Shook, is in critical condition. Police have yet to explain why Adams, who was described by friends as “chill” and almost reclusive, singled out the doctor or whether the two men had any relationship. But Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., told Charlotte’s WBTV Thursday that he had learned from law enforcement officials that Robert Lesslie had seen Adams as a patient. Sheriff officials would not confirm the relationship. “He was treating him and stopped giving him medicine, and that’s what triggered the killings from what I understand,” said Norman, whose district encompasses Rock Hill. Members of the Adams family have their own theories. They wonder whether football may have damaged his brain in the same way that has led other players to turn violent and, in a few cases, take their own lives. On Thursday, Alonzo Adams, Phillip's father, told WCNC, a Charlotte television station, “I think the football messed him up.” His sister, Lauren Adams, told USA Today that he had recently become uncharacteristically aggressive. “His mental health degraded fast and terribly bad,” she said. “There was unusual behavior.” Adams’ brain will be studied to determine whether he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated hits to the head, according to Sabrina Gast, the coroner in York County. It can take months to receive a diagnosis for the disease, which has been linked to mood disorders, memory problems, impulsive behavior and other issues, and has been found in hundreds of former football players. Former coaches, colleagues, neighbors and associates who knew Adams described him in interviews as a hardworking athlete who never advanced beyond journeyman status in the NFL but who remained a quiet, helpful presence in town. “In 43 years, if you would’ve told me that this would have happened with Phillip Adams, I would’ve put him in the last five of the thousands of kids I coached,” Montgomery said Thursday. “It’s just a sad day.” Duane Belue, a longtime friend and neighbor of the Adams family, said Phillip Adams was close to his mother. Although Adams had bought a new truck, he did not appear to overspend, and he stayed with his parents for extended periods. Within the last year, the Belues said, they noticed that Adams’ behavior had changed. He was less approachable and would pace outside aimlessly. “We noticed in the yard, he was out walking, kind of sad,” Anne Belue said. “You can’t judge somebody that far away, but he was always real friendly before then.” A star player in high school and in college at South Carolina State, Adams was picked by the San Francisco 49ers in the seventh round of the 2010 NFL draft. He sustained a severe ankle injury his rookie season that may have derailed his career. “The bone went through the skin,” said Scott Casterline, Adams’ former agent. “Luckily, he had a good surgeon who helped him. But when a team sees a devastating injury like that, they move on.” After the 49ers released him, Adams bounced around the league with stops in New England, Seattle, Oakland (where he sustained two concussions), the New York Jets and Atlanta. He had one more shot at landing a roster spot, according to Casterline. During training camp in 2016, the Colts called and asked Adams to get to Indianapolis to participate in practice the following day. Casterline urged his client to jump on the next flight, but Adams — who was always gung-ho for football — was suddenly hesitant. “He made it to the Charlotte airport, but the flight had left already,” Casterline said. “I could tell his head was not in it. He’d given up on it.” Casterline described Adams as a loner, not one to go to clubs or drink alcohol. He also hinted at financial troubles. Adams earned $3.6 million during his career and, at one point, wanted to invest in a smoothie shop. Casterline, who said he thought of Adams as a son, told his client it was a mistake because many retail businesses fail. Last fall, Adams called his former agent and asked for help finding employment. Casterline said he had tried to persuade him to relocate to Dallas and work at one of his companies. “I said to just come out here to Texas,” Casterline said. “He just wouldn’t do it. He had a son. He was a good father and it was difficult with the baby’s mother.” On Wednesday, the day of the shootings, Adams’ father, Alonzo Adams, called Casterline and said he wanted to talk about his son. Casterline did not find the message unusual. Occasionally, Adams’ parents called if they were unable to find Phillip. “I called Alonzo back and left a message, not realizing it had already happened,” Casterline said. In a news conference Thursday, York County Sheriff Kevin Tolson said evidence recovered from the home of the Lesslies had led them to suspect Adams of the killings. Authorities said they had evacuated the Adamses’ home and tried to persuade Phillip Adams to surrender. They found him inside, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot. It is often difficult to assign a motive to cases where a gunman has not left a note or spoken specifically of his or her intent, even more so in cases that end with the gunman’s death. But some of Adams’ friends said he had never gotten over how his NFL career ended. Rather than catching on with one team and landing a big contract worth tens of millions of dollars, he bounced from team to team, often playing for the league minimum salary. The calls for his services stopped coming, a common fate in the NFL, because colleges produce dozens of cheaper, healthier replacement players every year. The disappointment of washing out was particularly acute for Adams, friends said, because he came from Rock Hill, which has given rise to so many NFL players. To Adams, even a six-year career — twice as long as the average — may have been a letdown when compared to those of other local players like Jadeveon Clowney, who was picked first overall in the 2014 draft and is a three-time Pro Bowl selection; tight end Benjamin Watson, who played 13 seasons with the Patriots, New Orleans Saints and other teams; and Stephon Gilmore, a defensive leader on the Patriots. “We have a saying around here: You could pay $6 on Friday night or you can wait a few years and pay $600 to see the kids around here play,” said Gene Knight, a broadcaster who has covered the city’s sports for decades. Charcandrick West, who played with the Kansas City Chiefs from 2014 to 2018 and shared an agent with Adams, said he and Adams had worked out together during a couple of offseasons. West said Adams was reserved and proud of his Rock Hill roots. “I never saw him get mad at anyone,” West said. “He was all about his business, washing and folding his clothes, real neat.” West added: “I feel like every athlete tries to keep high expectations. When you’re from Rock Hill, such a great football town, he didn’t want to be known as the guy who bounced around.” Casterline, who has worked as an NFL agent for decades, also said Adams had trouble grasping why he didn’t catch on with a team. “Sometimes, these decisions are political,” Casterline said of teams’ cutting players. “Someone who’s drafted in the first round is going to get the most opportunities. That weighed on him a lot. The Patriots cut him three times in one season. They needed him, they didn’t, they’d cut him and re-sign him. It’s good for the paycheck but not for the psyche.” Knight, the local sports broadcaster, remembered Adams as “a fierce competitor on the field, but he was a gentleman off the field all the times I encountered him.” Knight had also been treated once by Robert Lesslie, a popular and well-known physician in Rock Hill, when he struggled with food poisoning. He said Lesslie had worked on him at 2 a.m., easing his symptoms with intravenous therapy. “It’s not two people whose paths I thought would cross in this manner,” he said. “And I think that’s what a lot of people are wrestling with in the whole craziness of this situation.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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  • A Teacher Marched to the Capitol. When She Got Home, the Fight Began.

    SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. — Word got around when Kristine Hostetter was spotted at a public mask-burning at the San Clemente pier, and when she appeared in a video sitting onstage as her husband spoke at a QAnon convention. People talked when she angrily accosted a family wearing masks near a local surfing spot, her granddaughter in tow. Even in San Clemente, a well-heeled redoubt of Southern California conservatism, Hostetter stood out for her vehement embrace of both the rebellion against COVID-19 restrictions and the stolen-election lies pushed by former President Donald Trump. This was, after all, a teacher so beloved that each summer parents jockeyed to get their children into her fourth grade class. But it was not until Hostetter’s husband posted a video of her marching down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol on Jan. 6 that her politics collided with an opposite force gaining momentum in San Clemente: a growing number of left-leaning parents and students who, in the wake of the civil-rights protests set off by the police killing of George Floyd, decided they would no longer countenance the right-wing tilt of their neighbors and the racism they said was commonplace. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times That Hostetter herself had displayed no overt racism was beside the point — to them, her pro-Trump views seemed self-evidently laced with white supremacy. So she became their cause. First, a student group organized a petition demanding the school district investigate whether Hostetter, 54, had taken part in the attack on the Capitol, and whether her politics had crept into her teaching. Then, when the district complied and suspended her, a group of parents put up a counter petition. “If the district starts disciplinary action based on people’s beliefs/politics, what’s next? Religious discrimination?” it warned. Each petition attracted thousands of signatures, and San Clemente has spent the months since embroiled in the divisive politics of post-Trump America, wrestling with uncomfortable questions about the limits of free speech and whether Hostetter and those who share her views should be written off as conspiracy theorists and racists who have no place in public life, not to mention shaping young minds in a classroom. It has not been a polite debate. Neighbors have taken to monitoring one another’s social media posts; some have infiltrated private Facebook groups to figure out who is with them and who is not — and they have the screenshots to prove it. Even the local yoga community, where Hostetter’s husband was a fixture, has found itself divided. “It goes deeper than just her. A lot of conversations between parents, between friends, have already been fractured by Trump, by the election, by Black Lives Matter,” said Cady Anderson, whose two children attend Kristine Hostetter’s school. Hostetter, she added, “just brought it all home to us.” Complicating matters is Hostetter’s relative silence. Apart from appearing at protests and the incident at the beach, she has said little publicly over the past year, and did not respond to repeated interview requests for this article. People have filled in the blanks. To Hostetter’s backers, the entire affair is being overblown by an intolerant mob of woke liberals who have no respect for the privacy of someone’s personal politics. Yet Hostetter’s politics, while personal, are hardly private, and to those who have lined up against her, she is inextricably linked to her husband, Alan, who last year emerged as a rising star in Southern California’s resurgent far right. An Army veteran and former police chief of La Habra, California, Alan Hostetter was known around San Clemente as a yoga guru — his specialty is “sound healing” with gongs, Tibetan bowls and Aboriginal didgeridoos — until the pandemic turned him into a self-declared “patriotic warrior.” He gave up yoga and founded the American Phoenix Project, which says it arose as a result of “the fear-based tyranny of 2020 caused by manipulative officials at the highest levels of our government.” Throughout the spring, summer and fall, the American Phoenix Project organized protests against COVID-related restrictions up and down Orange County, and Alan Hostetter’s list of enemies grew: Black Lives Matter protesters. The election thieves. Cabals and conspiracies drawn from QAnon, the movement that claims Trump was secretly battling devil-worshipping Democrats and international financiers who abuse children. By Jan. 5, Alan Hostetter, 56, had graduated to the national stage, appearing with former Trump adviser Roger Stone at a rally outside the Supreme Court. His appearance there and the next day at the Capitol prompted some of San Clemente’s more liberal residents to make bumper stickers that read: “Alan Hostraitor.” It also led the FBI to raid his apartment in early February, though he was not arrested or charged with any crime. (He, too, did not respond to interview requests.) Kristine Hostetter was there every step of the way, raising money and filming her husband as he rallied supporters at protests. When the American Phoenix Project filed incorporation papers in December, she was identified as its chief financial officer. The Teacher Kristine Hostetter grew up in Orange County back when locals still joked about the “Orange Curtain” separating its conservative and overwhelmingly white towns from liberal and diverse Los Angeles to the north. In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon turned an oceanside villa in San Clemente into his presidential getaway, christening it La Casa Pacifica. John Wayne kept his prized yacht, Wild Goose, docked up the coast in Newport Beach. “Orange County,” Ronald Reagan once declared, “is where the good Republicans go before they die.” It also was where surfers and spiritual seekers met cold warriors and conspiracy theorists, where some of the conservative movement’s most virulently racist, anti-Semitic and paranoid offshoots went. In the 1960s, Orange County saw a surge in the popularity of the John Birch Society, an anti-communist organization that in many ways presaged the rise of QAnon. In the 1980s, its surf spots became a magnet for neo-Nazis and skinheads. And in 2020, the onset of the pandemic produced a new generation of Orange County extremists. If Kristine Hostetter had any strong political leanings before last year, she did not let on, said her niece, Emma Hall. She only picked up the first hint of her aunt’s rightward drift at small party to celebrate the Hostetters’ wedding in 2016. “There were about six people, friends of theirs, that did not let up asking me if I was going to vote for Trump,” recalled Hall’s husband, Ryan. Neither of the Halls gave it much thought. Hostetter seemed happy, and her new husband exuded the laid-back charm that typifies a certain kind of Southern California man in the American imagination. He led his yoga classes at a studio not far from where they lived, in one of the small apartment blocks packed onto the steep hillside rising from the beach. His sound healings drew a mix of well-to-do women and New Age types seeking “that peaceful place within us all that we can all touch if we just devote a little effort to finding it,” as he put it to VoyageLA magazine in 2019. His new wife also got into yoga, Emma Hall said. Then came the pandemic and the American Phoenix Project. “It just went from zero to a hundred, from not talking about politics at all to the only thing he was talking about was how Gavin Newsom was a dictator and COVID-19 is a fake and China and QAnon, Ryan Hall said. As for Kristine Hostetter, she “wasn’t out shouting about it like Alan, but she was there,” her niece added. In style and rhetoric, the American Phoenix Project married the mistrust of institutions so common among New Age devotees with a paranoid form of Trumpism gaining purchase across the country. Its protests quickly gained supporters — from self-described yoga moms to Dana Rohrabacher, the Republican former congressman. At first, Kristine Hostetter appeared to keep her distance. When other teachers asked about the American Phoenix Project, “she was always like: ‘Oh, that’s just him. That’s not me,’” said a colleague, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing school administrators. Soon enough, though, Kristine Hostetter was joining her husband at protests. When he and seven other people were arrested in May at a protest to tear down a temporary fence around the town beach, she set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for their defense. As the year went on, the American Phoenix Project grew steadily more extreme. There was talk of domestic enemies and executions, curfew-breaking street parties and “patriot patrols” to monitor the few small Black Lives Matter protests in and around San Clemente. Alan Hostetter began wearing a “Q” pin in his fedora, and gained a reputation among those who disagreed with him as a menacing figure. At one point, he suggested a woman who commented on one of his Facebook posts should come find him in person. “But before you try too hard to pay me a visit, let’s play a little game, snowflake,” he wrote in a Facebook direct message reviewed by The New York Times. “Let’s compare what we were both doing in 1995.” He was a police officer at the time. “You might pause a little bit before you look too hard for me,” he added. That his wife had accosted people wearing masks in public only intensified concerns. Indeed, a number of San Clemente residents interviewed for this article would not allow their names to be used for fear of provoking the couple. At the American Phoenix Project, they were joined by Russ Taylor, who owns a graphic design business, a multimillion-dollar home and a red Corvette he calls the “Patriot Missile.” The group’s board included Morton Irvine Smith, scion of a quarrelsome California family that once owned much of the land on which Orange County was built. In January, the four of them traveled to Washington. The American Phoenix Project helped pay for the Jan. 5 rally in front of the Supreme Court. A day later, they all listened to Trump’s speech at the Ellipse and marched to the Capitol. How close Kristine Hostetter got to the building remains an open question. But Alan Hostetter and Taylor appear to have made it to the terrace on the west side of the building, and posted images of themselves a short distance from where a mob was battling the police. The Petition Esther Mafouta was visiting her grandparents in Spain when, a day after the Capitol attack, a friend texted her a photo of a woman marching in Washington that was making the rounds on Twitter. It was her old fourth-grade teacher, Kristine Hostetter. “I kept zooming in to check if that was really her,” Mafouta, 18, said in an interview. “I remember how shocked I was.” What until then had largely been a local skirmish in the national battle over COVID restrictions and stolen-election claims was about to be threaded together with the other explosive through line of 2020 politics: the fight over racial justice. Mafouta says she has only warm memories of her time in Hostetter’s class and cannot recall being mistreated or singled out for being Black. But, she said, “maybe I didn’t notice it because I was so young. Maybe it affected how she viewed me and my other peers of color.” In the years since, Mafouta said, she has grown keenly aware of race, and last year she and three friends, inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country, started their own group, CUSD Against Racism, to fight the bigotry that they say pervades the schools in and around San Clemente. Their first move was an open letter to the Capistrano Unified School District that attracted more than 800 signatures. The letter castigated the district for not explicitly supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and demanded a series of progressive reforms, such as adopting an explicitly anti-racist curriculum at all grade levels and hiring more people of color as teachers and mental-health counselors. A decade ago, far milder proposals would have been dead on arrival in almost any corner of Orange County. But the county is in the midst of a remarkable political shift. In 2016, Orange County voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1936. Two years later, the congressional district that includes San Clemente elected a Democrat for the first time since its creation in 1972. Yet the county, and especially San Clemente, remains overwhelmingly white, and frictions over race persist. As recently as 2019, San Clemente High School made national news when students shouted racial epithets at opposing players during a football game. The open letter written by Mafouta and her friends included dozens of pages of testimony from students about episodes of racism at the 63 schools in the district: Black students pressured into giving white friends a “pass” to use a slur for African Americans. Latinos being described as dirty. A teacher asking an Asian student what it was like to use a hole in the ground as a toilet. A Jewish student being asked if he had killed Jesus. It was in that context that Mafouta and her friends, seeing the Jan. 6 photo of Hostetter, with her Trumpist views and ties to the American Phoenix Project, decided they wanted the school district to do something about it. So they did what they knew best. They drew up a petition. “The Confederate flag was flown in the Capitol for the first time in history. That kind of speaks on the insurrection in general,” said Mafouta, who is now a freshman at Columbia University. “Kristine Hostetter is affiliated with that movement,” she continued. “We don’t know if she reflects those values, but that is something that is of grave concern to us.” The Fallout Signatures started piling on as soon as the petition went online. It was only days after the attack on the Capitol, and “we all wanted answers,” said Sharon Williams, a mother of a third grader at a different school who signed the petition. She did have concerns about free speech, she said, but if “you’re out there promoting violence and conspiracies, and you’re a teacher, that’s problematic.” Hundreds of other people who signed the petition also opted to send the school district an email pre-written by the students. It called on the district “to explicitly address the rampant white supremacy and anti-Semitism that occurred during the Capitol breach.” The email, however, sidestepped an inconvenient fact — many people in the district, including some school board members, felt very differently about what had taken place on Jan. 6. While they said they were horrified by the mob attack on the Capitol, many were at least sympathetic to the stolen-election claims and the protesters who had rallied that day in Washington. Where progressives saw a battle in the war against racism, a great many others saw censorious liberals trying to silence dissent by tarring conservatives as racists. “When did our youth lose sight of innocent until proven guilty and treating people fairly and respectfully?” Judy Bullockus, president of the school district’s board of trustees, wrote in a widely circulated email. No one had written an open letter or posted a petition when teachers attended Black Lives Matter rallies, Bullockus said in an interview. No one had called for an investigation when a teacher displayed a Black Lives Matter poster in the background while teaching remotely. “Now they want us to investigate a teacher’s politics?” she asked. “When someone had a different opinion, then suddenly the rules of the game change?” The school board, though, was hardly united. Two members, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering their colleagues, said they wanted her fired. Both argued that Kristine Hostetter displayed poor judgment, and they were troubled by her open advocacy for an extreme cause. But, one of them said, “the place where she teaches? A lot of the parents agree with her.” San Clemente is home to about 65,000 people, and Hostetter’s school, Vista Del Mar, is in one of the city’s toniest neighborhoods, an enclave in the arid hills above downtown where million-dollar homes sit behind well-watered lawns. The affluence is apparent in the small traffic jam that forms outside school each weekday morning — a long line of Teslas, BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers just up the street from the golf club and the small shopping center with a Pilates studio and a pet spa. Among the parents who support Hostetter is Denise Martinez, whose daughter is in her class. It was a matter of free speech and a teacher being targeted for her right-wing views, Martinez said. “And they started calling her a racist, that she was anti-BLM.” Martinez’s mother came from Mexico, as did her husband’s entire family. Her daughter, who is “a pretty dark Mexican in a very white school,” has encountered outright racism, she said. But “never in Ms. Hostetter’s class.” “She’s always preaching how everybody’s equal, it’s what’s on the inside that matters,” Martinez said. And now Hostetter is back in the classroom. The district reinstated her last month after its investigation found she had done nothing more than protest peacefully in Washington. That may have settled the matter as far as the district is concerned. But for many people, nothing has been resolved. If anything, Hostetter’s case has served as a still-unspooling coda to the Trump years. “Frankly, it’s hard to get stoked about sending flowers and birthday cards to a classroom teacher who appears to align herself with a conspiratorial social movement and embraces the racist values of QAnon,” one mother wrote in an email to other parents. The parent said she was waiting for an explanation from Hostetter, or even “an apology in the event she did something she now regrets.” She is likely to be waiting a long while. In an email sent to a fellow teacher days after getting back to work, Hostetter betrayed no hint of regret. “If I was teaching students about journalism, I might consider a discussion about bias in the media, fact-checking and journalistic integrity,” Hostetter wrote to the teacher, who advises the student newspaper at San Clemente High School. The paper had broken the news of her suspension, and she went on to suggest in a second email that the student journalists should “reflect on whether they allow their own bias, or that of their peers, to influence their articles.” Now that she had been cleared, Hostetter hoped another story was in the works. “I will not be available for an interview, however,” she added. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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