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Marion “Suge” Knight pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter Thursday in the 2015 hit-and-run death of a man outside a Compton restaurant after a dispute related to the film “Straight Outta Compton.”
The plea deal struck in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom calls for Knight, 53, to serve 28 years in state prison.
Knight’s attorney, Al DeBlanc, first contacted the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office about a possible plea deal on Wednesday, according to Lillian Carter, the widow of victim Terry Carter.
Knight has been behind bars since January 2015, when he was arrested and charged with
intentionally ramming his Ford F-150 pickup into two men in the driveway of Tam's Burgers at Central and East Rosecrans avenues in Compton. He originally faced life without the possibility of parole if convicted.
Carter, a 55-year-old Compton native who knew Knight through the music industry, was killed. Cle “Bone” Sloan, who was involved in a physical altercation with Knight moments before the incident, was severely injured but survived.
Knight and his legal team have described the victim as a longtime friend and said the mogul was “heartbroken” to learn Carter had been killed. Carter’s wife, Lillian, disputed that in a recent interview with the Times, saying her husband only knew Knight through business dealings and that the two had not been close in several years.
A Compton native, Carter grew up on Piru Street — the block from which the notorious sect of the Bloods street gang takes its name — but he was well known for helping young men avoid gang life, according to his family. An entrepreneur with a penchant for building custom lowriders, he also worked as a car salesman and music producer, and owned several automobile businesses and limousine services, his wife said. He first met Knight in the early 1990s, after the mogul and rapper Dr. Dre asked him to build a custom car for a giveaway as part of the promotion for Dre’s solo debut album, “The Chronic,” according to his wife.
The bloody crash followed an argument on the set of a commercial for the movie "Straight Outta Compton,” which chronicled the rise of the seminal hip-hop group N.W.A. Authorities say Knight, who was depicted in the movie, was upset about not receiving financial compensation for the use of his likeness.
Footage from the burger joint's security camera shows Knight's truck barreling into Carter and Sloan. The former rap impresario — who fled the scene but eventually turned himself in — originally pleaded not guilty, arguing that he acted in self-defense. His legal team has long argued there were men with guns at the scene attempting to injure or kill Knight, but prosecutors have contended there is no evidence to support that.
The 53-year-old is also accused in separate cases of robbery and
threatening the movie’s director, F. Gary Gray.
Knight’s case had evolved into a bizarre and winding legal saga long before Thursday’s plea agreement. In the three years since his arrest Knight has tried to bolster his self-defense argument by claiming a hit man hired by Dr. Dre —was present at Tam’s on the day of Carter’s death. Knight has cycled through more than a dozen attorneys on the murder case, seemingly firing lawyers indiscriminately. As recently as Wednesday he pleaded with Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen to fire his court-appointed defense attorney.
In addition to drama within the courtroom, prosecutors have also accused members of Knight’s inner circle of conspiring to manipulate the case. Two members of Knight’s legal team — Matthew Fletcher and Thaddeus Culpepper — were arrested on charges of witness tampering earlier this year. Knight’s fiancee, Toi-Lin Kelley, is serving three years in prison for helping Knight violate a court order that barred him from communicating with anyone other than his attorneys. She was also accused of helping arrange the sale of a video of the killing to gossip website TMZ, court records show.
Born Marion Hugh Knight Jr., the Compton native was long considered an intimidating force in the city and the hip-hop scene. He excelled early on the football field, playing defensive end in college before earning a short stint with the Los Angeles Rams as a replacement player during the 1987 strike. When his football career fizzled, Knight — 6-foot-4 and 300-some-odd pounds — worked as a bodyguard for celebrities, including Bobby Brown, and began spending more time in music circles. In the early 1990s, Knight and Dre formed Death Row Records
As the label exploded into a $100-million-a-year enterprise, Knight built an infamous reputation. One newspaper dubbed him “the most feared man in hip-hop” and another compared him to John Gotti, the notorious New York City mob boss. During a newspaper interview, Knight, then 29, told a New York Times reporter, “If I wanted to, I could really scare the hell out of you.”
That reputation also led Knight to frequently find himself in the cross hairs of law enforcement.
In 1992, he was charged with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, court records show. In a search warrant affidavit filed at the time, authorities alleged that Knight had ordered two aspiring rappers to their knees in a Hollywood studio, fired a shot near them and pistol whipped one of the men. The case spiraled into a public relations disaster for police — Knight, it turned out, had signed a record deal with the teenage daughter of former Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Lawrence M. Longo, the prosecutor overseeing his probation in the assault case. Knight also lived in an oceanfront Malibu home owned by Longo’s family.
Four years after the assault, Knight was at the wheel of a BMW just off the Las Vegas Strip when his passenger, rapper Tupac Shakur, was fatally shot by an unknown gunman. A couple of months later, rapper Vanilla Ice publicly accused Knight of taking him to a 15th-floor hotel balcony and threatening him to sign over song royalties. In 1997, a judge sentenced Knight to nine years in prison for violating his probation in the assault case by getting in a fight in Las Vegas. Soon after his release, Knight returned to custody when state parole officials determined he’d violated the terms of his release by punching a parking lot attendant at a Hollywood club.
Knight’s penchant for being linked to violent acts went both ways. In 2014, less than a year before Carter’s death,
he was shot in a West Hollywood nightclub during a party hosted by R&B performer Chris Brown.
nikkas pulled hammers on him
What does that even mean? Suge ran over a dude, backed up and did it again. And anytime you see a defendant go through TWELVE defense attorneys in the same case you know it’s a wrap.
