Kaleb Charters, the 18-year-old accused of dropping three people off in the Pleasure Point neighborhood of Santa Cruz, in 2019, to rob and kidnap tech executive and cannabis entrepreneur Tushar Atre, then driving up to the marijuana farm in Los Gatos where he’d worked for Atre—to prepare the crime scene where his former boss would be killed—was convicted of felony murder today.
After a day of deliberation at the Santa Cruz County Superior Courthouse, the jury decided Charters—now several years older—was guilty on all counts, following dramatic closing arguments from Assistant District Attorney Michael McKinney.
“‘Get on the ground! Put your hands behind your back!’” McKinney shouted at the jury Monday afternoon to kick-off his closing argument, recreating the violent events that played out at Atre’s oceanfront home, then up at the rural property in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the victim was executed and left on the forest floor. “Left him shot four times, stabbed seven.”
Stephen Nicholas Lindsay and Charters’ brother, Kurtis Charters, were previously convicted and are serving life in prison. Joshua Camps, who admitted to shooting Atre in the head, has yet to be dealt with by the justice system.
McKinney said Lindsay and Kaleb Charters, who’d both worked for Atre at his weed grow, had $200 withheld from their paychecks and were humiliated by him—forced to do 500 pushups outside.
“Was he a major participant, and did he act with reckless indifference?” is a key question McKinney reminded the jury they had to focus on, when it came to Kaleb Charters’ role in the string of brutal crimes. “We know that the defendant did his part.”
In his closing arguments, defense lawyer T.J. Brewer, of Santa Cruz-based Page & Dudley, positioned his client as an upstanding citizen who made a bad decision to get involved in a robbery that went sideways.
“The whole revenge narrative sounds really good for the papers,” he said, disputing the prosecution’s theory and arguing there was no way Charters could’ve known Camps would pull the trigger of the AR-15 that Oct. 1, 2019 morning at 3:30am. “He did not aid and abet the murder of Tushar Atre.”
McKinney painstakingly laid-out the reams of evidence connecting Charters to the others, telling the People’s story of what happened in nitty-gritty detail.
He tried to highlight aspects that wouldn’t make sense if they were just planning to steal money from Atre while he wasn’t around and they weren’t planning to kill him.
“For a burglary plan they’ve got it all,” McKinney said, suggesting there was no need for three of them to take a detour from Las Vegas, where they were living, to Lancaster to pick up Camps and his AR-15—or the armor-piercing rounds—instead of heading straight to Santa Cruz. “It’s a plan to kill.”
And, he added, they didn’t bring masks that would conceal their faces properly.
On the drive up from Lancaster, Charters was “the hype man,” McKinney said.
The lives of the perpetrators had just been shaken-up by Atre, a multimillionaire tech executive who’d started the web agency AtreNet, with one of them even dropping out of college after being dazzled by his wealth, according to the prosecution.
“Their plans to ride Tushar’s coattails were dashed,” McKinney said, characterizing the situation when the employment opportunity in Los Gatos fell apart. “So, it’s fitting where they chose to take him to.”
Given the defendant’s army training, he could’ve at least tried to save the victim’s life, but he chose not to, the prosecutor added.
“He sat around dividing up the money,” he said. “He took his equal share.”
In fact, in text message evidence from after the murder, the defendant writes “I quit the right way” about his Santa Cruz job. In another he replies that what someone told him is “more f***** up than what we do for money.”
Brewer told the jury his client’s brain wasn’t fully developed, because he was barely an adult. He argued the post-murder text messages were his way of coping with a situation that had spiraled way beyond what was intended.
“What do you do with a taboo subject? You make taboo jokes,” he said. “Kaleb was the least involved.”
Brewer asked the jury to take into consideration the fact Charters testified for three days and didn’t shy away from the tough questions.
“You never saw him get mad. You never saw him blow up at anybody,” he said. “He was remorseful.”
But just one day later—at the end of their first full day after being sent to begin deliberations—the jury returned with a unanimous verdict: guilty on all counts (including murder, robbery, burglary, kidnapping and carjacking).
And given the special circumstances agreed to as true by the jury, he knew that meant in a matter of days his client will be sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole.
“Both Kaleb and myself respect the jury’s decision,” he said in a telephone interview with the Los Gatan. “All you can ever really ask is for 12 members of the community to come in and do their best with the law.”
He says he doesn’t regret putting his client on the stand. But he was hoping for a different result.
“You do the best you can in cases like this, and you leave it in the jury’s hands,” he said. “It’s hard sometimes to take those verdicts. I mean, I’m not going to lie to you. It doesn’t feel great…but this is the system we have, and from what I felt, he got a fair trial.”
