Is it ‘OK to kill somebody, to rape somebody’? Family of murder victim demand higher bond

Charged with raping and shooting a woman in a Charlotte hotel, a 22-year-old sparked outrage from a Charlotte family and the police chief when he walked free from jail on a $50,000 bond. During a tense court hearing Tuesday, he was sent back to jail — this time with an $850,000 bond.

Raphael Omar Wright was charged with rape and murder for allegedly assaulting and killing Michelle Lynn Schechter, 27, on June 16. When he appeared in court June 29, Mecklenburg County District Court Judge Jennifer Fleet set his bond at $50,000.

He was in jail for less than 17 hours after that.

“Disappointed doesn’t begin to describe how I feel in the decision to set a bond that low for a suspect charged with such serious violent felonies,” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Chief Johnny Jennings said in a statement after Wright’s release.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Wright’s defense attorney, Christine Clarke-Peckham, told Superior Court Judge Reggie McKnight that the bond should not be changed or revoked.

“He is not a danger,” Clarke-Peckham said, as the grandmother of Schechter’s child sighed.

Oh my —

“... He is a victim,” Clarke-Peckham finished.

Assistant District Attorney Ashley Nicole Robinson said there was no evidence to label him as such. Robinson said the state “wholeheartedly disagrees” with the bond set by Fleet.

McKnight declined to completely revoke Wright’s bond, as the state requested, but he did raise Wright’s bond for the murder charge to $750,000 and the bond for the rape charge to $100,000.

Charlotte’s low-bond murder-rape case

When CMPD responded to a call at Econo Lodge in west Charlotte on June 16, Schechter told police she’d been raped as she bled from a gunshot wound, according to an arrest affidavit. She later died at the hospital.

Detectives found surveillance footage showing Wright walking into Schechter’s room. He left shortly after she ran outside “nearly naked,” holding her chest and back, Robinson said in court. Wright sped away, and footage showed him changing his clothes, abandoning his car in a parking lot and running off with a backpack, Robinson said.

Police later arrested him in Rock Hill, S.C.

During interviews, Wright told police he met Schechter on an escort website and “arranged for them to meet up to engage in a sexual encounters,” Clarke-Peckham said.

When he was in the hotel room, he told police a man came out of the bathroom and told him to “give him all he’s got” while pointing a gun at him. He said he thought the shot he fired toward the man struck Schechter, she said.

The man, Wright told police, ran out of the room behind him.

But surveillance footage does not support that story, Robinson said. No one else leaves the room, she said.

Schechter’s boyfriend of nine years told police they were visiting Charlotte for Father’s Day, Robinson said. He was gone when Wright walked into the hotel room.

Two families in court

Schechter’s father, who was in court Tuesday, “stays up all night” and “can’t speak about the incident,” Robinson told the judge.

Her boyfriend’s mother, who is the grandmother to her 9-year-old child, spoke in court — a tissue never leaving her hand.

The low bond, she said, “is almost saying that it’s OK to kill somebody, to rape somebody.”

“I am afraid,” she continued, “my son can’t even bear the trauma to be here today.”

Three rows behind her, seven of Wright’s family members filled a row inside the courtroom.

None of them spoke as Clarke-Peckham described Wright as a churchgoing man. He played football throughout high school and college before dropping out to become an electrician, she said, and he planned to go back to college.

“Before I was appointed to this case, I heard about it on the news,” Clarke-Peckham told McKnight.

She thought the bond was unusual at first, she said, but then she realized “Fleet set this bond exactly as the legislature tells her to.”

Wright had no previous offenses, she said. The 22-year-old was “barely a man.”

Revoking Fleet’s bond, she said, “would set a dangerous precedent.”

“But isn’t that what we do all the time?” McKnight asked. “The state and defendants file motions to change or revoke bond every day.”