Dad makes impassioned plea to help find soldier son's killer

Pfc. Chad Patrick Dellit, 22, was shot in the head outside the Innkeeper Hotel at 1720 Skibo Road sometime at 11:08 p.m. on Sept. 21.

They have not released a motive for the crime but have said that Dellit was visiting someone at the hotel and that it didn't appear as if anything had been stolen from him.

Dellit's father, Todd Dellit, is convinced somebody in that busy area of Fayetteville had to see something.

"For somebody to take him out like this was wrong," Todd Dellit said Friday. "What I'm asking for is for the people of Fayetteville to come through for me, to help me find this guy that took him out, that did this to him."

Gavin MacRoberts, a spokesman for the Fayetteville Police Department, has said that police were called to the Innkeeper less than two hours prior to finding Chad Dellit lying between two cars.

He is approximately 25 to 35 years old, has a dark skin tone, stands 5 feet 8 inches tall to 6 feet tall and weighs approximately 160 to 200 pounds. He either is bald or has short hair.

Investigators believe he might be a transient who known to have recently spent time in the Cross Creek Mall area of Fayetteville.

Anyone who recognizes the man in either image or remembers seeing a man wearing similar clothes on the evening of Sept. 21 is asked to call the Fayetteville Police Department at 910-587-3254 or Crime Stoppers at 910-483-TIPS (8477).

Chad Dellit, of Fulton, Ill., was assigned to the 20th Engineer Brigade of Fort Bragg. He enlisted in the Army in September 2008.

"He wanted to be a lifer," his father said. "That was his dream. He wanted to be in for life. That's all he ever talked about."

Todd Dellit said he and his wife had prepared for the possibility that their son wouldn't return home if he were ever deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, but he never had a chance to deploy.

"To end up on U.S. soil and someone to take a shot at him in a hotel parking lot, like that – this boy would have given the shirt off his back and helped anyone out," Todd Dellit said. "That's the way we raised him."