Suge Knight Hospitalized after Fall in Vegas Jail

Suge Knight
Suge Knight

Rap music figure Marion “Suge” Knight will post bail and return to California to face a robbery charge following treatment at a Las Vegas hospital for a blood clot in his chest discovered after he fell in jail, his attorneys said last Monday.

A judge set bail at $75,000 for the 49-year-old Knight, who attorneys Richard Schonfeld and Julie Raye said also was being treated for a painful bruise on the back of his head and neck after falling back against a metal post while doctors checked him in jail on Thursday for dizziness and chest pain.

“I don’t think there’s anything life-threatening,” Raye told reporters outside court, “but they’re concerned about the blood clot in the lung area.

She and Schonfeld said they expected Knight would post bail by the end of the day.

Raye traced Knight’s medical problems to six bullet wounds she said Knight suffered in an early Aug. 24 shooting at a West Hollywood nightclub. Two other people also were injured in the gunfire at 1OAK on Sunset Boulevard. Authorities have not identified a suspect.

Raye said she visited Knight in the hospital on Friday and Sunday. She said Knight had said he felt short of breath Thursday before appearing before a Las Vegas judge who reduced a June 2013 suspended license charge to a parking ticket and fined Knight $190 on what had been a suspended license warrant.

The traffic charge against Knight surfaced when he was arrested Wednesday in Las Vegas and comedian Katt Williams was arrested in the Los Angeles area on a felony warrant issued the day before based on a celebrity photographer’s complaint that they stole her camera Sept. 5 in Beverly Hills.

Schonfeld told Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Joe M. Bonaventure that Knight was unaware of the warrant when he traveled to Las Vegas.

Raye said Knight passed out in a jail cell before doctors connected him to an electrocardiogram heart monitor, and he was standing in a treatment room when he fell.

Knight’s Death Row Records was on the leading edge of rap music in the 1990s.

Knight has prior felony convictions for armed robbery and assault with a gun. He pleaded no contest in 1995 and was sentenced to five years’ probation for assaulting two rap entertainers at a Hollywood recording studio in 1992.

He was sentenced in February 1997 to prison for violating terms of that probation by taking part in a fight at a Las Vegas hotel hours before rap star Tupac Shakur was fatally wounded in a drive-by attack as he rode in Knight’s car just east of the Las Vegas Strip. Shakur’s slaying remains unsolved.

Knight eventually declared bankruptcy and the record label was auctioned off.

Latest Stories

Latest Podcast

A.L. Smith - Harold Washington Legacy Committee