3 Face Trial in Drug Killings

Federal authorities in Tennessee said Tuesday that they will seek the death penalty against three reputed Los Angeles gang members accused of killing seven people and wounding a 3-year-old girl, allegedly to protect a vast drug enterprise.

It was the latest development in an ongoing investigation in which 40 people have been indicted for gang-related drug trafficking, money laundering and firearms offenses in Los Angeles, Nashville, Oklahoma and Memphis.

The indictments allege that three members of a notorious Los Angeles street gang, the Rollin’ 90s Crips -- Jamal Shakir, 29; Eben Payne, 24; and Donnell Young, 27 -- are responsible for the slayings of six other gang members or associates.

Execution is the appropriate penalty because the crimes were intended to prevent the victims from cooperating with police, authorities said.

“This case should serve as a wake-up call about the dangers of gangs, drugs and guns,” said Jim Vines, U.S. attorney in Nashville.

“The indictment charges that the defendants killed members of their own gang to protect their criminal enterprise,” Vines said. “Anyone who may be tempted to join a gang should pay attention to how gang members actually treat one another.”

The three defendants, who are all in federal custody in the Los Angeles area, are scheduled for trial on May 19, according to Assistant U.S. Atty. Sunny A.M. Koshy, who is co-prosecuting the case in Nashville.

Payne and Young have pleaded not guilty. Shakir will also plead not guilty, according to his attorney, Natman Schaye of Tucson.

“The government has chosen to hide virtually all of their evidence from us,” Schaye said.

“But the case, as we understand it, will be largely based on the testimony of many informants who have been arrested or convicted of terrible crimes and who are being compensated by the government to testify,” the attorney said.

Shakir, Schaye said, “is not the terrible, evil person the indictment paints.”

The indictment, originally filed in 1999 and expanded last month, charges Shakir with killing or aiding and abetting in the shooting deaths of six people.

The first of those slayings occurred on Sept. 30, 1995, in Los Angeles, when a gun with a silencer was used to kill a purported Rollin’ 90s member named Solomon Harris.

That case, investigated by Los Angeles Police Department robbery-homicide detectives, eventually led federal, state and local authorities to form a task force that allegedly linked half a dozen other killings to the three men.

In addition to the LAPD detectives, the investigation included Nashville and Oklahoma City police and agents of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the U.S. Postal Service.

Shakir, authorities allege, led a faction of the Rollin’ 90s Crips known as the Rollin’ 90s Neighborhood Crips or the Bangside 90s. That faction, which included Payne and Young, over time distributed more than 330 pounds of cocaine and trafficked in marijuana and crack cocaine, investigators allege.

Shakir, being prosecuted under a federal drug “kingpin” statute, allegedly used juveniles to run drugs, provided guns to one juvenile courier and, with others already prosecuted, engaged in money laundering.

In one particularly gruesome crime, Shakir and Payne are charged with the fatal shooting in Oklahoma City of Kenard Murry and his pregnant girlfriend, Regina Suetopka, and seriously wounding Suetopka’s 3-year-old daughter, Kimberly.

Investigators allege that Murry was a hit man for the gang who helped Shakir kill Harris in Los Angeles.

Less than two years later, Shakir allegedly directed Payne to kill Murry and his girlfriend in their home.

The 3-year-old had been shot in both elbows and was found days after the shootings lying next to her mother’s body in a bloody bed.

The girl was eventually handed over to an aunt.

Her injuries drew so much attention in Oklahoma that state lawmakers helped set up an education trust fund for the girl, who became known as “Baby K.”

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Times research librarian John Tyrrell contributed to this report.