Lorenzen Wright should have celebrated his 46th birthday on November 4th. Maybe he would be helping his old college in Memphis and Penny Hardaway on the Tigers bench. Or to be part of an NBA staff. We’ll never know.
After 13 seasons in the NBA with five different jerseys and a last freelance with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2009, Wright retired, but did not have the opportunity to take advantage. In July 2010, the bullet-riddled body of the 7th pick of the 1996 Draft was found in a corner of the Tennessee forest.
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For nearly 7 years, local police worked unsuccessfully on this case, until the murder weapon was found in a lake in Mississippi in 2017. The deacon of a church in Tennessee, Billy Turner, was then arrested and charged with the murder after an accused was denounced who allegedly helped him clean up the crime scene. Links between the suspect and Lorenzen Wright’s ex-wife, Sherra, mother of their 6 children, are gradually being established.
At the very beginning of the investigation, Memphis police officers searched the house of the widow, divorced from Lorenzen Wright for several months, and found pieces of burnt metal as well as a letter addressed to her late husband and to herself.
It was only a few years later that these elements would make sense and allow the puzzle to be reconstructed. Investigators have long kept the young woman on their list of potential suspects, but never succeeded in establishing her guilt.
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From the first interviews, in order to remove any suspicion, Sherra Wright-Robinson tries to put the investigators on the trail of a settling of scores linked to a drug story, although her ex-husband has a clean criminal record. . She even mentions the visit of armed men in their house a few days earlier, in search of the former NBA player.
A few weeks after the arrest of Billy Turner, Sherra Wright-Robinson was in turn arrested in California. She recognizes her complicity in the assassination of the former NBA player. The reason: to touch the million dollars planned in the life insurance of Wright and notified in the letter previously quoted.
After pleading guilty during her trial in the summer of 2019, Sherra Wright-Robinson is sentenced to 30 years in prison, which she is serving at this time, with the possibility of a request for release in 2026. The couple’s 6 children reside with their children. grandmother, Deborah Marion, mother of Lorenzen Wright. The twins Lamar and Shamar both wear the jersey of the Edwardsville Cougars, a college in Illinois.
The trial of Billy Turner, accomplice of Sherra Wright-Robinson, was to take place in 2021.
