Marion "Suge" Knight, the former chief executive of Death Row Records, was arrested in West Hollywood on Friday on suspicion of murder after authorities said the vehicle he was driving struck two men in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant.
One of the men died, and the second was hospitalized, the Los Angeles County sheriff's office said.
Thursday's is the latest in a long line of violent brushes with the law by Knight, 49, the former hip-hop mogul who helped usher Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg into the mainstream, sometimes using brute force and building up his own myth along the way.
A sheriff's office spokesman, Sgt. Diane Hecht, said Knight became involved in an argument at 3 p.m. Thursday with several men who were working on a movie in Compton, Calif., where Knight and Death Row Records made their name.
Shortly after, authorities said, the dispute moved from the film set for Straight Outta Compton, a biographical film about the rap group NWA, to the nearby parking lot of Tam's Burgers, where Knight put his red Ford F-150 truck in reverse and struck two people who had been standing behind the vehicle.
Knight then drove away, hitting the men again, the sheriff's office said.
About 10 hours later, after the sheriff's office had issued an alert that investigators were seeking to question him, Knight -- accompanied by a lawyer -- drove to a sheriff's station in West Hollywood to turn himself in.
A video showed Knight smoking a cigar, laughing and waving to cameras as he approached the station. Before reaching the entrance, Knight, in sunglasses at night, placed the end of his cigar on a tree branch.
"When I get out, I can always smoke it," he said.
At 3 a.m. -- after about two hours of questioning -- he was arrested and charged with murder, Hecht said. He was being held in lieu of $2 million bail.
James Blatt, Knight's lawyer, called the event an accident that occurred when Knight tried to escape from an attack by four men who were trying to grab him through the driver's side window.
"Because he was in fear for his life, he accelerated and made his escape," Blatt said. "He did not have any knowledge that he hit anyone."
While the sheriff's office has not yet identified the victims, Blatt said the deceased was Terry Carter, a friend of Knight's, who was in "the wrong place at the wrong time."
Knight "will be exonerated," the lawyer said, urging any witnesses or those with video to come forward.
A former high school football star who played briefly in the NFL and once worked as a bodyguard for the singer Bobby Brown, Knight helped found Death Row Records in the early 1990s and became one of the faces of gangster rap. The label released a series of highly successful albums that came to define rap music.
Knight served nearly five years in jail for violating probation during a 1996 fight at a Las Vegas hotel. Hours after that fight, Shakur was fatally shot while riding in Knight's car.
Ten years after that murder, which is still unsolved, Knight filed for bankruptcy. Death Row Records was later sold at auction for $18 million.
A Section on 01/31/2015