The early morning hours at Tender Hearts Child Care in East Charlotte are usually quiet, marked only by the soft hum of a 24-hour facility caring for the city’s youngest residents. But this past Monday, that peace was shattered by a confrontation that ended in a senseless tragedy. Albert Lowery, a 44-year-old husband and dedicated worker at the center, was simply trying to do the right thing when he crossed paths with two men looking for a quick score.
It all started around midnight. Lowery’s wife, Jessica Moss-Lowery, told investigators that her husband called her to say he had just chased off two men who were trying to saw the catalytic converter off an SUV in the parking lot. At the time, it seemed like a small victory for the neighborhood. The thieves fled in an old black Honda Civic, and life briefly went back to normal. Lowery stayed close by, sitting in his car, likely keeping an eye out to make sure they didn’t come back.
Sadly, the men did come back, and they weren’t looking to steal car parts anymore. Just before 3 a.m., a white sedan pulled into the lot and stopped right in front of Lowery’s vehicle. According to police surveillance footage, the car sat there for only thirty seconds—just long enough for a flurry of gunfire to erupt. Inside the day care, Jessica heard the shots and felt a knot tighten in her stomach. She reached for her phone to call Albert, but for the first time that night, he didn’t pick up.
The scene Jessica walked into was every spouse’s worst nightmare. She found Albert slumped in the driver’s seat of his car, unresponsive and bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds. Though first responders rushed him to Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center, the damage was too severe. Albert was pronounced dead just after 3:30 a.m., leaving behind a family and a community struggling to understand how a dispute over a car part could turn into a cold-blooded execution.
Detectives didn’t have to look far for leads. They found shell casings from both a 9mm handgun and a .300 Blackout rifle scattered on the asphalt. They also discovered that one of the suspects, 33-year-old Rethanachantra Em, was already known to police as a repeat catalytic converter thief. When they tracked him down, his phone told the rest of the story. Text messages between Em and his partner, 32-year-old Borein Ngiem, showed them coordinating their “meet point” just forty-five minutes before the shooting.
By Thursday, police had both men in handcuffs. Em and Ngiem are now facing a laundry list of charges, including first-degree murder and felony conspiracy. For the families who use Tender Hearts, the news of the arrests brings a small amount of relief, but the scars remain. While the building itself wasn’t hit by any stray bullets, the sight of a Chevrolet Malibu riddled with holes in the parking lot serves as a grim reminder of how close the violence came to the children sleeping inside.
Albert Lowery is being remembered today not as a victim of a crime, but as a man who cared enough about his workplace and his community to stand up for it. His death has sparked a wave of grief across East Charlotte, leaving neighbors like Angelia Bates feeling uneasy about the safety of their once-quiet streets. For now, the investigation continues, but the core of the story remains a heartbreaking one: a man lost his life just for being a good neighbor.
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