Suge Knight has agreed to pay $1.5 million to the family of Terry Carter to avoid a second trial over the wrongful death lawsuit he was facing.
The Death Row Records co-founder appeared via video at his court hearing on Tuesday, April 29, and accepted the terms of a last-minute deal guaranteeing compensation to Carter's widow, Lillian, and his two daughters, Nekaya and Crystal. Each woman will receive $500,000.
“It’s hard living without him when I lived all those many years with him. It’s been very, very difficult,” Lillian told Rolling Stone. “I’ve been in pain ever since January 29, 2015, I haven’t had a good day, not one good day.”
The Carter family sued Knight after he was arrested and charged with murdering Carter in 2015. The former music executive was accused of backing into Carter and Cle “Bone” Sloan with his two-ton Ford Raptor truck in the parking lot of Tam's Burger in Los Angeles. Knight left both men for dead, however, Sloan survived. Knight turned himself in for questioning the following day and was swiftly arrested.
Knight pleaded not guilty to the charges and claimed he hit Carter on accident while he was fleeing from an armed attack. He went through legal hurdles for three years before accepting a plea deal. As part of the deal, his murder charge was reduced to voluntary manslaughter, and he was sentenced to 28 years in prison. The Carter family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Knight and took him to trial in 2022. The trial ended in a mistrial after the jury was deadlocked.
During this week's hearing, Knight asked the judge what would happen if he moved forward with the trial without his estranged lawyer David Kenner, who had tried to withdraw from the case due to a conflict with Knight. The judge told him that jury selection would begin this week and the trial would begin even if Knight represented himself. He agreed to the settlement and dodged the trial.
“Terry was a friend of mine," Knight told Rolling Stone after the hearing. "It definitely wasn’t done intentionally. It wasn’t done to bring harm to him. One of the reasons I settled [is] I got respect for Terry, so that means I’ve got respect for his family. … I didn’t want to put the family through more pain. It’s not that I did anything wrong. I never would have. But I do owe the family an apology because of this thing they had to go through.”