Adam was a freelance photographer hired by the discharged detective David Tapp to follow Dr. Lawrence Gordon, the man he suspected of being the Jigsaw Killer. Adam was kidnapped by Jigsaw's apprentice Amanda Young and placed in a game alongside Dr. Gordon, which took place in a large dilapidated bathroom. Each of them were chained to pipes on opposite sides of the room, with a presumed dead body in the middle, and were given specific instructions on what they needed to do in order to survive. Dr. Gordon had to kill Adam by six o'clock, while Adam simply had to escape. After failing to complete their respective tasks by the deadline they were confronted by Zep Hindle, an orderly from Dr. Gordon's hospital. Adam beats Zep to death with a toilet tank lid, believing he is responsible for their abduction, and Dr. Gordon crawls away to get help, having sawed off his foot, and promised to return to Adam. While searching Zep's body for a key, Adam finds a tape recorder which reveals that Zep was a victim in the game and only following instructions in order to obtain an antidote for a poison in his blood stream. As the tape ends, the body gets up and the real Jigsaw reveals himself. When Adam tries to shoot him, he is incapacitated with an electric shock and Jigsaw seals the bathroom door, leaving Adam in the darkness of the bathroom to die. While the main assumption was that Adam simply died of thirst when his corpse was shown in "Saw II", he was later shown to have been killed out of guilt by Amanda Young in a flashback in "Saw III" shortly after the end of the first "Saw" film, by suffocating him with a plastic bag.