Suge Knight turns himself in after hit-and-run death in Los Angeles

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/30/suge-knight-alleged-murder-hollywood-car

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The hip-hop mogul Marion “Suge” Knight has handed himself in to Los Angeles police in connection with a hit-and-run incident that left one man dead and another injured, following a fight on a film set.

The Death Row Records founder, 49, drove his truck over the men in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant in Compton on Thursday afternoon, police and witnesses said, shortly after an argument broke out on the set of a biopic about the rap group NWA.

In a brief statement released early on Friday, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department said Knight was at the West Hollywood station with his lawyer and was being interviewed by homicide detectives. ABC7 Eyewitness News, based in southern California, tweeted a picture it said was of Knight arriving at the police station.

Police said some witnesses described the incident as deliberate, and it was being treated as a homicide. Knight’s lawyer, James Blatt, told reporters it was an accident.

#BREAKINGNEWS: Suge Knight has arrived at Sheriff's West Hollywood Station, following deadly hit & run in Compton. pic.twitter.com/AukImJPtfj

Knight’s truck was found abandoned in a car park in Westwood about 20 miles (32km) north of Compton, a largely black and Latino neighbourhood where the incident happened.

The sheriff’s department had issued a bulletin warning all southern California law enforcement to “be on the lookout” for Knight, considered armed and dangerous and wanted for questioning for homicide, the entertainment news site TMZ.com reported.

Knight co-founded Death Row Records with Dr Dre in 1991 and built it into a pioneering rap label that for a time dominated the genre. Despite his commercial and critical success, Knight’s life seemed to reflect the violence depicted in many rap lyrics. He was at the wheel of a BMW in Las Vegas in 1996 when gunmen in another vehicle shot his passenger, the rapper Tupac Shakur. Shakur died a week later.

Knight has spent the past two decades alternating between jail, for various assaults and parole violations, and living in Malibu, where he had a mansion, and Hollywood, where he inhabited a dark celebrity twilight. Last year, a gunman shot him six times at a nightclub during a pre-awards party hosted by the singer Chris Brown.

It is unclear what prompted the sequence of events in Compton on Thursday. A film crew was shooting a biographical drama film, Straight Outta Compton, based on the NWA album of the same name that went platinum in 1988.

The film depicts the rise and fall of the group, formed by Eazy-E, Dr Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella. Critics said their lyrics glorified misogyny and cop killing. Fans said they captured the rage and alienation of a forgotten underclass. The film is due for release later this year.

An initial confrontation began around 3pm when Knight and two unidentified men started arguing on the set, Lieut John Corina of the LA County sheriff’s department told reporters. About 20 minutes later the two men visited nearby Tam’s Burgers where Knight allegedly followed and ran them over in the parking lot, Corina said.

“Looks like he drove backwards and struck the victims and drove forwards and struck them again. The people we talked to say it looked like it was an intentional act,” he said, adding: “They obviously knew each other. They got into some kind of verbal altercation and it escalated … we are handling it like a homicide.”

According to media accounts, the argument began when the film’s security guards asked Knight to leave.

Blatt, Knight’s lawyer, said his client, still recovering from last year’s gunshot wounds, was in fragile health and had acted in self-defence. “He was in the process of being physically assaulted by two men and in an effort to escape he unfortunately hit two [other] individuals. He was in his car trying to escape.” The lawyer said he expected his client would be “totally exonerated”.

TMZ said the 55-year-old dead man, which it named, was a friend of Knight and had arrived with him at the scene and was walking to the passenger door of Knight’s vehicle when the rap mogul hit the accelerator.

This is the latest in a long line of Knight’s run-ins with the law. In 1997 he was sentenced to nine years for violating probation terms from an earlier assault case. He was released in 2001 only to return to prison two years later for violating parole by assaulting a car park attendant. He filed for bankruptcy in 2006 and sold his Malibu mansion. In 2009 he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of battery.

Compton, a sprawl of low-rise, mostly poor housing, was originally a white suburb. Middle-class black Americans moved in from the 1940s and the white population began to move out. Venus and Serena Williams grew up in Compton hitting tennis balls on concrete courts. Many middle-class black people left after the 1992 Rodney King riots, branding it a ghetto.

The mayor, Aja Brown, talked up Compton as LA’s answer to Brooklyn, in a 2013 interview with the Guardian.