Death Row Says No Link to Rapper in Murder Case

Death Row Says No Link to Rapper in Murder Case Reuters Apr 14 2003 9:58PM LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hip hop mogul Suge Knight said on Monday he has never met an aspiring rapper charged with a grisly Los Angeles murder, as the lawyer who filed a wrongful death lawsuit linking the two conceded that the facts of the case had been thrown into doubt.

Antron Singleton, a Texas-born rapper also known by the stage name "Big Lurch," is awaiting trial on murder and torture charges and faces the death penalty if convicted of killing his roommate and eating part of her lung in April 2002.

On Friday, the victim's mother, Carolyn Stinson, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against Knight's Death Row Records, two individuals named as employees and a second company identified as Stress Free.

The lawsuit alleged that the record labels had provided Singleton with drugs, including PCP, and encouraged him to "act out in an extreme violent manner to make him more marketable as a 'Gangsta Rap' artist."

That culminated, the lawsuit charged, in the murder of Tynisha Ysais, 21, who was found in her southeast Los Angeles apartment with teeth marks on her face and on pieces of her lung, which had been torn from her chest.

Singleton was arrested on a nearby street after police found him staggering naked, apparently dazed and covered in blood.

But Knight, who heads the record label now known as Tha Row, told Reuters on Monday that he had never met Singleton and had never heard of the other company named in the lawsuit as a division of Tha Row.

"I don't know this guy.... Nobody from our company knows this guy," Knight said. "I never even heard the guy rap."

As to the source of the confusion, Knight said that "a lot of people out there want to have a production deal (and) think that they have a production deal even if they don't."

Stinson's Beverly Hills-based lawyer, Winston McKesson, admitted that the lawsuit, which attracted widespread media attention, might have been based on a mistaken assumption that Singleton had ties to Knight's label.

"We're continuing to investigate," McKesson said. "If it turns out that Death Row is right -- that there is no connection, we will drop them (from the lawsuit) immediately."

Knight, who remains on parole after serving five years in prison for assault and federal weapons charges, said the filing had been an attempt to cash in on the rap brand he established.

"They're just looking to get paid," he said. "It's not only just slander. It's fraud."