Bloody Shoe May Complete Fall Of Playground Legend After Years Of Drugs And Thefts, Adams Now On Trial For Murder

Richie Adams’ sneakers once carried him toward a pro basketball career. Now, authorities say, a bloody size 13-1/2 basketball shoe implicates the fallen star in the brutal killing of a 14-year-old girl.

Adams, who played for coach Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV from 1981-85, was due in court Friday for stalking and slaying a neighbor, authorities said - the final step in his slide from prospect to suspect.

At 6-foot-9, Adams was a defensive genius - nicknamed “The Animal” for his intensity - whose shot-blocking and rebounding drew comparisons with a young Bill Russell. He was twice the Pacific Coast Athletic Association player of the year.

“If he hadn’t become his own undoing, this is a guy who could have played in the NBA, had a good career,” said New York scout Tom Konchalski.

But Adams, who grew up in the Bronx and went to high school in Harlem, was on a path of self-destruction that derailed his NBA aspirations.

Drafted in the fourth round by the Washington Bullets in 1985, Adams was arrested a day later for stealing a car off the Bronx streets he could never escape. The Bullets never even invited him to training camp, and the rest of the NBA ignored him.

Adams then joined a long line of New York City playground stars - like Earl “The Goat” Manigault, who got hooked on heroin, and Karlton Hines, who was shot to death in a drug dispute - in learning it takes more than a good game to make it.

He played professional ball in South America, but was inexorably drawn back to the Bronx. There, years after the NBA gave up on him, Richie Adams still had some celebrity on the local courts - and a taste for cocaine.

Supporting his habit with a series of thefts, Adams was arrested twice in 1988, for robbing a woman at an automated teller machine and purse-snatching. A 1989 conviction for larceny and armed robbery led to a five-year prison stretch.

“I was a hoodlum,” Adams confessed during a 1991 jailhouse interview. He was paroled in 1994 and returned once again to the Bronx.

Friends say there was never any sign Adams was capable of murder. Authorities disagree.

The teen victim, Norma Rodriguez, was savagely beaten; her chest was caved in and she suffered neck and head injuries. Her battered body was discovered Oct. 15 in a housing project hallway one floor below where Adams, 33, was living with his mother.

The family of the slain high school freshman says Adams stalked her and was infuriated when she rejected his advances. Adams was arrested eight days after the killing, pleaded not guilty to murder, and was held without bail.

It was a sneaker that led police to Adams - a bloody size 13-1/2 Adidas shoe found near the crime scene, authorities said.

Friends describe Adams as exuberant off the court, intensely determined on it. But they have trouble equating the kid from the late ‘70s with a killer.

“It doesn’t sound like Richie at all,” said Sidney Green, a former UNLV teammate and now head coach at Southampton College. “I hope they find the right person, but Richie Adams? No way.”

Adams’ arrest came despite the best efforts of many to save him. In 1988, Tarkanian sent his recently arrested ex-player plane tickets to Las Vegas. The UNLV coach hoped to land him a job, get Adams out of the Bronx.

Adams sold the tickets.

“I love Richie,” Tarkanian said after the arrest, providing an epitaph for Adams’ career. “But he just never made a right decision.”