Rock Hill community shares heartbreak after beloved doctor, family shot to death

It didn’t take long for word of the tragedy to spread quickly around the city of Rock Hill — there had been a mass shooting that left five people dead, a sixth wounded.

Dr. Robert Lesslie, who had practiced medicine in York County for decades, and his family were shot at their home on Wednesday.

Lesslie, 70; his wife, Barbara Lesslie, 69; grandkids, Adah Lesslie, 9; and Noah Lesslie, 5, were killed, as was James Lewis, 38, of Gastonia, N.C., who was found dead outside the home. A sixth person was shot, and was airlifted to a Charlotte hospital. Lewis and the survivor were doing work at the house for the family.

As emotions spilled into Wednesday night and Thursday morning, Rock Hill mourned, as did family and friends in North Carolina who knew Lewis. Professors, pastors, elected officials and other leaders shared their reactions with The Herald.

Everyone’s best friend

Asked what made Robert Lesslie his best friend for 40 years, Wayne Wingate interrupted the question.

“Robert was a lot of people’s best friend,” said Wingate, a longtime Rock Hill business and civic leader who now lives in Simpsonville, S.C.

“I mean it. I’ve really been thinking about this over the past day. Robert was the kind of person who always asked you how you were doing. He really meant it. It wasn’t a platitude. It wasn’t rhetorical. He sincerely wanted to know.

“The second part of that was, ‘What can I do to help you?’”

That help could take many forms, Wingate said. For some it was money that Lesslie never expected to get back. For others, including Wingate, the support could be humor or long spiritual conversations that helped the listener traverse dark and painful times.

The friends’ last conversation took place last week, when Wingate said he called Lesslie to ask about a common acquaintance in Rock Hill who is critically ill.

“We ended our conversations like we always did. I told him, ‘I love you,’ and he said, ‘I love you, too.”

To Wingate and others, Lesslie was an emergency-medicine visionary who grew the city’s first urgent care center. On his farm south of Rock Hill, Lesslie dabbled in horticulture, raised miniature donkeys, built a maze out of Leland cypress trees and had one of the city’s earliest banks of solar power cells.

He loved golf, played the bagpipes and wrote a column about his emergency room experiences for the Charlotte Observer for several years.

Wingate said he and other close friends of the Lesslies have been trapped in “the unimaginable.”

When Wingate heard about the shooting, he and his wife, Polly, drove two hours north to Rock Hill just to be there. They spent the night with a friend, then drove back to Simpsonville on Thursday morning.

“Soon as we got home, I told Polly, ‘I’m going for a walk. I need to talk to Robert,’” Wingate recalled.

And so he did. He said he walked through his neighborhood talking out loud with his friend, crying and laughing along the way.

“I told him how much I appreciated him,” Wingate said. “I think he knew that.”

‘We are standing in the midst of this tragedy’

Prominent Winthrop University professor Scott Huffmon sat in the barber chair in disbelief and spoke about what he’d heard Thursday morning. Then, his barber piped in, Huffmon said. He knew Lesslie, too.

“Some random mass shooting is, to many of us, simply a tragic story, and it’s one we see with a 10,000-foot view,” Huffmon told The Herald. “But we are standing in the midst of this tragedy.

“And because Dr. Lesslie — and that his whole family is prominent and involved in the community — there’s going to be no one in Rock Hill who’s not, at minimum, one or two degrees separated from someone whose life has just been flipped upside down,” Huffmon said.

York County authorities identified the suspect as Phillip Adams, a former Rock Hill High School basketball and football player who was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2010. County Coroner Sabrina Gast confirmed that authorities found Adams dead Wednesday night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Rock Hill Mayor: ‘Reflect on who we are’

Rock Hill Mayor John Gettys and his family were close friends of the Lesslie family. They’d gone to the same church for years and he, along with his wife and children, had been treated by Lesslie at some point, Gettys told The Herald.

“Anytime someone loses their life in our community unnecessarily ... that is time for us, as a community, to pause and reflect on who we are and what we can be,” Gettys said with a deep sigh. “And I think that this particular episode really brings that question into focus for us — maybe more so than we’ve seen in other times.”

The mayor, normally composed in his words, spoke slowly and paused after each sentence. Gettys pointed out that Barbara Lesslie worked as the art director of a local camp for special needs individuals, and said Lesslie’s office was a staple in the area.

“We’ve got to continue to recognize that as a community, we’re strong because of our relationships,” Gettys said. “And relationships are strong because they are tested and tried. This is our opportunity, as a community, to honor the Lesslie family’s legacy of always looking to serve others.”

Former Rock Hill Mayor Doug Echols, who held his position for 20 years, said the Rock Hill community lost “contributing lives of service.”

“The senselessness of gun violence across our country has hit our community very hard,” he told The Herald. “That pain is now personal for many of us.”

‘Heroes from our area’

CT Kirk was on vacation at Surfside Beach when he heard the news.

The Lancaster middle school history teacher is also a local spiritual leader and civil rights activist whose roots in Rock Hill are as broad and deep as almost anyone’s. He called the victims the “heroes from our area.”

“This is gonna be a hard one,” Kirk said.

Kirk knew of the Lesslie family and his work as a doctor in the community. He also personally knew the Adams family. His wife was close to Adams’ mother, Phyllis, who taught Kirk at Emmett Scott — the long-closed K-12 school that was the only one Black students could attend during segregation. (Adams’ mother was also a teacher in the Rock Hill School District for years. “This is tragic for everyone,” the district wrote in a statement Thursday evening. “Mrs. Paden-Adams was once a teacher in our district and worked with many students to make a difference in their lives.”)

Kirk also said that Adams — the guy who made it to the NFL, the stage on which so many kids from Rock Hill dream of being — had plans already in motion to give back to Rock Hill, including starting a business that provides healthy food options to families who can’t afford them.

“Violence has no race, it has no face, it has no color,” Kirk said. “It’s just violence. And we got to stop associating everything with race in this country and really get to the heart of the matter, really start dealing with issues.”

‘Beloved’ colleagues

Lewis, 38, appears to have been doing heating-and-air conditioning work at the Lesslie home when he was fatally shot.

His employer, GSM Services of Gastonia, described Lewis and another company employee involved in the shooting as “longstanding, beloved members of our family at GSM.”

“These men embody the values we strive to achieve at GSM and are family-focused, upbeat and wonder team members who cared about all the people they encountered.”

Robert Shook, another technician, was injured and remains in serious condition, Sheriff Kevin Tolson said Thursday afternoon.

“He is a hard-working man who put himself through school to become a certified hearing and air service worker, to provide for his family,” Shook’s cousin, Heather Michele, told Charlotte TV station WBTV. “He is just a wonderful, wonderful man.”

Lewis came to the Charlotte-area from Flint, Mich., public records show, and he formerly lived in Charlotte and Mount Holly.

SC politicians speak out

U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman, and his wife, Elaine, had known the Lesslie family for more than 40 years, the congressman told The Herald Thursday afternoon.

Outside Sub Station II on Cherry Road, Norman recounted several memories with the family. He said he saw Lesslie this week at the bank, and their wives, who were in a singing group together, had lunch late last week.

“To end like this is just so tragic,” Norman told The Herald. “When he was alive, he lived.”

Norman called Lesslie “a unique, funny individual.” He’d routinely go to the physician for medical advice, Norman said.

“One time, I had something minor,” Norman said. “I said, ‘Robert, what do you think it is?’ He looked in a very deadpan look and voice, as he normally did. He said, ‘Ralph, you’re going to have to have a lung transplant.’ I said, ‘Really?!’ Of course, he started laughing.”

Norman said Lesslie and his wife had a tremendous impact on the Rock Hill area.

“There is a huge hole in our hearts this morning,” Norman said. “Though we are overwhelmed with sadness and confusion, I thank God for the blessing of Robert and Barbara’s friendship, and what their family has meant to so many people throughout our community.”

U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, on Twitter Thursday morning, called the mass shooting “very sad.”

“My deepest sympathies and prayers are with Dr. Lesslie’s family and the Rock Hill community,” Scott wrote.

This story was originally published April 8, 2021 at 11:51 AM.

Cailyn Derickson

The Herald

Cailyn Derickson is a city government and politics reporter for The Herald, covering York, Chester and Lancaster counties. Cailyn graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has previously worked at The Pilot and The News and Observer.

Alex Zietlow

The Herald

Alex Zietlow writes about sports and the ways in which they intersect with life in York, Chester and Lancaster counties for The Herald, where he has been an editor and reporter since August 2019. Zietlow has won nine S.C. Press Association awards in his career, including First Place finishes in Feature Writing, Sports Enterprise Writing and Education Beat Reporting. He also received two Top-10 awards in the 2021 APSE writing contest and was nominated for the 2022 U.S. Basketball Writers Association’s Rising Star award for his coverage of the Winthrop men’s basketball team.