JUST IN: Norman 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
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.
