A Raleigh man was arrested Saturday morning for trying to hire someone to kill a man involved in a fatal highway crash that killed his mother almost eight years ago.
Rhett Michael Barlow, 22, was arrested at Fort Liberty by the Wake Forest Police Department and the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division. Barlow is accused of soliciting to murder Donald Caulder Jr. of Laurinburg.
In March 2016, Caulder was charged with misdemeanor death by motor vehicle and failure to reduce speed when he rear-ended Barlow’s mother, Michelle Simone Barlow, 42, with his Freightliner dump truck. The crash occurred south of the Burlington Mills Road intersection on Capital Boulevard.
Michelle Barlow was driving a Toyota Sienna minivan at the time of the crash. The dump truck Caulder was driving was loaded with loose logs and towing a trailer carrying a 9,800-pound Bobcat loader. A Highway Patrol investigation found that the brakes on the trailer were not functioning because they hadn’t been connected to the truck.
The force of the impact pushed Michelle Barlow’s minivan into the back of a tractor-trailer truck driven by Marvin Douglas Erb, then 49, of Danville, Virginia.
Barlow’s minivan was crushed and the dump truck came to rest partly on top of it, The News & Observer reported at the time.
Caulder, then 29, was arrested in Scotland County by the North Carolina State Highway Patrol and was convicted in…
