When Suge Knight sped away from Tam’s Burgers in Compton, California, on Jan. 29, 2015, he left two men lying on the asphalt behind him. He had just shifted gears and barreled over the pair with his two-ton Ford Raptor truck. One of the men, Terry Carter, would die from multiple blunt force injuries within the hour.
The other man, Cle “Bone” Sloan, was rushed to a hospital with two crushed ankles and a serious head laceration. Knight abandoned the truck and turned himself in for questioning at 3 a.m. the next day. He was arrested and charged with murder.
The violent incident devastated Carter’s family. A respected businessman who built lowrider cars and co-founded a record label with Ice Cube in 1998, Carter, 55, was a doting husband and father, relatives said. He once fully remodeled his daughter Crystal’s bedroom, including the installation of a fireplace, to keep her from moving out when she turned 18. After nearly 2,000 mourners packed his funeral, his family was left with a 10-year legal nightmare and a seemingly endless calendar of criminal and civil proceedings.
Knight, now 60, quickly proclaimed his innocence, saying he was the victim of an ambush. He claimed Sloan, who had been working as a “technical advisor” on the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton, had threatened him with a gun. An actor and anti-violence activist who appeared in Training Day with Denzel Washington, Sloan denied the claim.
After three years contesting his charges, Knight accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to 28 years in prison. (He would later seek to overturn the conviction.) Meanwhile, a trial over a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Carter’s family ended with a deadlocked jury. On the eve of a retrial this month, Knight would fight with his longtime lawyer, David Kenner, in open court and scuttle a last-minute deal.
The judge overseeing Knight’s retrial says the 10-year-old case is the oldest on his docket. Kenner, now 82 years old, has asked to withdraw, citing a mysterious conflict with Knight, who’s refusing to let him quit. At a hearing set for Tuesday, Judge Thomas Long is expected to face some tough decisions. Knight says he wants a retrial. The Carter family has been waiting a decade for resolution. But Kenner is working against his will, with Knight locked up in a San Diego prison. If Kenner is cut loose, the court will have to figure out what comes next, with the trial clock ticking.
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So how exactly did we get to this strange place? Here’s your cheat sheet on Knight’s legal history and the biggest moments leading up to Tuesday’s hearing.
Who is Suge Knight?
Knight rose to fame in the 1990s as the CEO of Death Row Records, the label he co-founded with Dr. Dre. He’s credited with helping bring West Coast rap to the masses, releasing classics such as Dre’s The Chronic, Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle and Tupac Shakur’s All Eyez on Me. Knight famously clashed with rivals and became known as “the most feared man in hip-hop.” In 1995, he pleaded guilty to two counts of assault with a firearm for a 1992 attack on aspiring rappers at a Hollywood studio. He was in the car with Shakur when the rapper was mortally wounded in 1996 in a drive-by shooting Las Vegas.
Knight was later sentenced to nine years in state prison for violating his probation after Shakur’s death. Prosecutors said surveillance video captured Knight “clearly” kicking a man named Orlando Anderson numerous times in the head at the MGM Grand casino hours before Shakur was fatally shot. Investigators generally agree Anderson was the gunman who killed Shakur, though he was never charged before his death in 1998.
Knight, meanwhile, served his time but would be charged again in three subsequent criminal cases. The first involved the alleged robbery of a female photographer. The second involved Carter’s death, while the third, an indictment returned in 2017, linked back to Knight’s alleged “criminal threats” made in 2014 against F. Gary Gray, the director of Straight Outta Compton. In one text, Knight allegedly said he would “make sure” Gray, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube received their “hugs” if they didn’t meet his demands, prosecutors said. “‘Hugs’ is street vernacular for harming another individual,” prosecutors wrote in a filing. They said Knight demanded payment for the use of his name and likeness in the film, which chronicled the rise of N.W.A, the group co-founded by Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E and Arabian Prince.
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January 2015: The Tam’s Burgers Incident
According to Los Angeles County prosecutors, Knight was angry when he was not included in the planning or production of Straight Outta Compton. They said he didn’t like his portrayal as more of a violent enforcer than visionary businessman. On Jan. 29, 2015, Knight arrived at a production office for the movie and asked for a meeting with Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. He was turned away and had an initial verbal confrontation with Sloan. A short time later, Knight drove up to the Tam’s Burgers in his tricked-out red truck. Surveillance video shows Sloan rushing up to the vehicle on foot and tangling with Knight through the window. Knight reverses the vehicle, knocking Sloan to the ground. Seconds later, Knight’s truck races forward again, running over Sloan and mowing down Carter, who was on the sidewalk at that point.
February 2015: Charged with Murder
Knight fled the scene with Carter and Sloan slumped motionless on the ground. He turned himself in about 12 hours later alongside his first in a long line of defense lawyers. Knight claimed he was the one who was under attack, but a grand jury indicted him on murder and attempted murder charges. He pleaded not guilty on Feb. 3, 2015, the same day paramedics took him to a local hospital in custody for what sources called a “panic attack.” He later collapsed in court again, and was briefly unconscious, after a judge jacked his bail to $25 million in March 2015. He had a revolving door of lawyers that included Kenner, and later, Michael Jackson’s star lawyer, Tom Mesereau.
April 2015: Sloan Testifies
Knight’s first major court hearing was in April 2015. Prosecutors’ star witness was Sloan, but he quickly turned combative, refusing to even identify Knight in the courtroom. “Yes, I know Mr. Knight, but that doesn’t look like Mr. Knight,” Sloan said, after staring directly at Knight. Asked if he remembered seeing Knight at Tam’s the day of the hit-and-run, Sloan replied, “No, ma’am.” He proclaimed he wasn’t a “snitch” and claimed he had almost no memory of the incident. Once he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, prosecutors granted him immunity. Sloan then, he admitted he was “very upset” with Knight that day, but claimed their meeting at Tam’s was a chance encounter. He denied he had a gun. He said the only thing he was carrying was a two-way radio from the movie set. “You called it a gun. It was a radio,” he told Knight’s lawyer at the time, Matthew Fletcher.
September 2018: Plea Deal and Sentencing
For the next three years, Knight cycled through more lawyers and tried in vain to get his charges dropped. After he was indicted in February 2017 for allegedly making the criminal threats against Gray, Knight was facing a combined maximum sentence of 100 years to life if convicted as charged, prosecutors said. While working with a public defender appointed by the court, Knight accepted a plea deal on Sept. 20, 2018. His murder charged was reduced to voluntary manslaughter and his robbery and threats cases were dismissed.
A transcript shows Knight answered “yes” or “yeah” more than 20 times when asked by the court if he understood the deal and that his no-contest plea was the same as a guilty plea. He was sentenced to 28 years in state prison. “You callously murdered my dad in cold blood,” Crystal Carter told Knight as she delivered her victim impact statement and called him a “menace to society.”
Carter’s widow, Lillian Carter, was too distraught to read her own statement. As she buried her face in her hands, her sister-in-law Jessica Carter read it for her. Lillian said she and Terry were high school sweethearts who went to prom together and reconnected years later to get married. She said they were together 29 years. “I’m not living. I’m just surviving. This is a nightmare,” she said of losing her husband. “The defendant complained about not having phone privileges. I only have one recorded phone message that I listen to over and over with a broken heart because I will never hear Terry’s voice again. I will never witness Terry smiling at me again. … Terry was a wonderful person and a role model. He was my husband and my best friend. He was exceptional.”
June 2015 to Present: Family’s Wrongful Death Lawsuit
Lillian, Crystal and Carter’s other daughter, Nekaya, filed their wrongful death lawsuit in June 2015, but it took a backseat to the criminal case for years. Once Knight was convicted, the family pushed for a trial. They claimed Knight intentionally ran over Sloan and Carter in what they described as a “foreseeable altercation” motivated by “corporate greed.” They named Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and the movie’s studio, Universal, as co-defendants, alleging they all knew about Knight’s “criminal temperament,” his longstanding tensions with Dre, and his objections to not being paid for his life story rights. They also claimed Sloan was hired to stand up to Knight if necessary.
“Defendants decided to fight fire with fire. Defendants needed their own criminal with a violent history who knew Suge, had stood up to him before and would not be intimidated by him,” the lawsuit said. They said Sloan was a well-known member of the Bloods, like Knight, and had a 10-year history of ill will with Knight.
A judge dismissed Dre, Cube and NBC Universal early in the process. “The court cannot fathom how Knight’s reckless and allegedly criminal attempt to run over Bone with his truck later in the afternoon was predictable with an ‘extraordinarily high degree of foreseeability’ such that a duty may be imposed on defendants,” the judge wrote in his 2016 decision dismissing Dre, Cube and NBC Universal from the case.
June 2022: Knight’s Testimony at First Civil Trial
Knight testified for the first time about the Tam’s incident on June 8, 2022, when he appeared over a video link from prison at the wrongful death civil trial. Sitting in front of a cinderblock wall and drinking what looked like an iced coffee, Knight gave rambling, often contradictory testimony about his state of mind the day Carter died. He claimed under oath that an unidentified law enforcement officer had told him Dr. Dre wanted him dead and was willing to pay. He said police told him Dre hired the man who shot him seven times at the 1 Oak nighclub five months earlier. Knight said his PTSD over the 2014 shooting kicked in when Sloan allegedly brandished a gun at Tam’s, leading him to accidentally run down Carter as he tried to flee. But while Knight’s claims about the murder-for-hire plot might appear to support his assertion he feared for his life and acted reasonably, Knight also testified that he didn’t actually believe Dr. Dre paid a hitman to kill him.
“Dr. Dre — we’ve been really good friends for years. Matter of fact, I know his kids, he knows my kids. And I was told that he had paid some guys to harm me,” Knight testified. “I didn’t believe it because authorities do lie. So I went up there [to the production office]. I was going to talk to him and say, ‘Hey man, I’m not going to react to what authorities say about you having something to do with me getting shot or paid somebody to get me killed. I just want to make you aware they are saying this and putting it out there.’”
Knight claimed he wasn’t at the production studio to complain that the movie’s script or demand money. He said maybe it would come up — but he mostly wanted a face-to-face with Dre to let him know what police purportedly were saying. He claimed that when he heard Dre and Cube were too “busy” for a meeting, it wasn’t a big deal. He claimed he later got a call from Carter, an old friend known in the area as a peacemaker and that Carter invited him to a special meeting with Dre across the street from Tam’s “to get some things squared away.” He said he was ambushed by Sloan when he arrived.
When the murder for hire allegation first surfaced in a court filing from one of Knight’s prior lawyers, Dre denied it through his own lawyer. “Given that Dre has had zero interaction with Suge since leaving Death Row Records in 1996, we hope that Suge’s lawyer has lots of malicious prosecution insurance,” Dre’s lawyer said. (Dre’s representatives did not respond to subsequent requests for comment sent by Rolling Stone during the 2022 trial.)
Dr. Dre and Suge Knight in New York circa 1995
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June 2022: Hung Jury and Mistrial
The deadlocked jury seemed to focus on the alleged murder-for-hire plot shortly before reaching the impasse that led to the mistrial. They asked to review Knight’s testimony “where he saw a cancelled check on [the alleged] hit on him by Dre” and “also his testimony where he said he did not believe Dre put a hit out on him.” The jury foreperson later told Rolling Stone that the deliberations got so heated, someone walking by the room thought a real fight had broken out.
“It was a bunch of foolishness,” juror Roger Stuart said, referring to Knight’s answers under oath. “A lot of the things that came out of his mouth didn’t make sense.”
Juror Halima Betton says she voted in Knight’s favor, even though she found some of his testimony “a little sketchy.” “I thought he was acting in self-defense,” she says. “We can’t be inside his head, but in my mind, the situation was a threat, and then it’s fight or flight. It was a very tragic outcome. I feel really bad for the ladies.”
March 2023: Knight Appeals Conviction
Though Knight’s plea to voluntary manslaughter took place in open court with Knight’s repeated confirmation he understood the proceeding, he’s now fighting the conviction. In a petition filed in 2023, he said his public defender at the time “forced” him into the deal because he was not prepared for trial and Knight was facing a possible life sentence. In his petition that he filed himself from prison, Knight said the 28-year prison sentence was unlawful because his 1995 plea deal in the gun assault case included the agreement it wouldn’t count as a strike. (The strike is what caused a portion of his sentence to be doubled from 11 to 22 years.)
For their part, prosecutors said the sentence was correct and scoffed at his claim it was racially motivated. In a March 4 ruling, Los Angeles County Judge Laura F. Priver “summarily denied” Knight’s request, known as a writ of habeas corpus, saying he took too long to file it and didn’t have the grounds to support it either way. Citing court transcripts, she said Knight’s court-appointed lawyer represented him adequately, adding that Knight’s lawyer had civilian and expert witnesses selected to testify at trial and noted that the voluntary manslaughter deal saved Knight from a murder charge carrying 25 years to life in prison.
“There is no valid evidence that the plea was coerced,” the judge wrote. She said it was “meaningless” that the jury on the 2022 civil trial failed to reach a verdict. “There was nothing which can be viewed as ‘newly discovered evidence’ that arose from the civil matter. The fact that the civil case hung is irrelevant.”
Kenner, who stepped in to help Knight with the petition after it was filed, called Judge Priver’s decision “shocking and unconscionable” and said Knight would appeal. “I think the court has grossly erred in the decision it rendered. I think it is legally improper and the court did not follow the law,” Kenner told Rolling Stone in March.
April 2025: Civil Retrial Runs Off The Rails
Knight was due to begin his retrial in the civil case on April 7, but at a hearing the week before, Kenner told the court he could no longer represent Knight after he recently learned something “disturbing” during a phone call with Knight. He declined to elaborate, citing attorney-client privilege, but said he felt “anxious about being able to competently and energetically try this case.”
Knight, meanwhile, said he would not let Kenner go. Judge Thomas Long denied the request, citing the impending trial, but pushed out jury selection another two weeks. On April 21, Kenner again asked to be relieved. Again, Knight and the judge shut him down. A day later, with jury selection about to start, Kenner and a lawyer for the Carter family told the court they had reached a partial settlement overnight. They claimed everyone, including Knight, had agreed to move straight to a damages phase “without admission of civil or criminal liability,” with the judge deciding possible damages, not a jury. But moments after the judge accepted the stipulation signed by the lawyers and set the trial for damages only for May 27, Knight piped up on his remote connection, a source tells Rolling Stone. Knight refuted Kenner’s claim they reached the agreement by phone the night before.
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“There was screaming and yelling,” the courtroom source says. A minute order for the hearing stated simply: “The defendant represents to the court that he does not agree to waive trial by jury.”
Kenner again renewed his motion to be relieved as Knight’s lawyer. This time, Judge Long “reserved his ruling” on the matter and set a follow-up hearing for Tuesday. “The court ordered everyone back next Tuesday, and I plan to be there. I’m given no other choice,” Kenner tells Rolling Stone.
