Rachael Emerlye
Santa Cruz, California – The story of Tushar Atre’s murder — a crime that stunned Silicon Valley and the cannabis industry alike — has taken on an unsettling new layer inside a Santa Cruz courtroom.
Kaleb Charters, a 25-year-old former National Guard member accused of killing Atre alongside three others, testified last week that the brutal 2019 slaying was the culmination of what he called a “toxic and dehumanizing” work environment at Atre’s cannabis business. Atre, a multimillionaire entrepreneur who made his fortune in tech before moving into legal marijuana cultivation, was kidnapped from his Santa Cruz home and later found dead near one of his mountain grow sites — stabbed, shot, and left in the dirt.
On the stand, Charters described a workplace where humiliation was routine and anger simmered just below the surface. He recalled one incident in which Atre ordered him and his brother-in-law, Stephen Lindsay, to perform hundreds of pushups before they could receive their paychecks. “You guys are in the Army. Do 500 pushups,” Charters said Atre told them after they misplaced keys to a company vehicle. “Tushar was flipping out,” Charters added, saying the boss threatened to cancel their paychecks altogether.
The tension, Charters claimed, wasn’t an isolated event. He testified that he and Lindsay worked ten straight days planting cannabis in the Santa Cruz Mountains, often from dawn until dusk, for $200 a day. “We were exhausted,” he said. “He was always yelling.”
According to prosecutors, that anger — and the resentment it fueled — became the motive for a deadly plot. Charters, Lindsay, Charters’ brother Kurtis, and a friend named Joshua Camps allegedly conspired to rob Atre of what they believed was $1 million in cash kept at his home. What began as a heist spiraled into a kidnapping and murder that investigators later called one of the most “cold-blooded” crimes in the county’s history.
In court, prosecutors played a video of Camps’ alleged confession. In the recording, he described the night in gruesome detail: how the group zip-tied Atre’s hands, gagged him with a sock, and dragged him from his home. “He kept saying, ‘Who are you guys?’” Camps said. “He didn’t know what was going on.” Atre was stabbed in the neck when he tried to escape, then shot several times — once in the jaw and twice in the back of the head — with an AR-15 rifle. “He wasn’t going to last much longer,” Camps said. “I knew he was going to die.”
Lindsay and Kurtis Charters were convicted earlier this year and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Camps and Kaleb Charters are now facing trial on charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping, robbery, and carjacking.
Testimony from former employees paints a disturbing picture of Atre’s leadership. Multiple workers described him as volatile, prone to berating employees and withholding pay. “They were humiliated in front of people,” said Detective Ethan Rumrill, who interviewed staff after the killing. Another employee, Sam Borghese, told jurors that Atre “pushed his workers very hard” and “invoked fear so people would work harder for him.”
To prosecutors, though, no toxic workplace could justify what happened next: a premeditated ambush, carried out by men Atre once employed and trusted.
Four years later, what began as a tale of ambition in California’s booming cannabis trade now reads like something darker — a story about power, greed, and the kind of resentment that curdles into violence. As one detective put it after the arrests: “You could feel the anger in that house. But no one thought it would come to this.”
