SLAUGHTER IN SIN CITY MONSTERS OF DEATH ROW
THE WORLD’S MOST EVIL MURDERERS AND THE HORRIFIC CRIMES THAT SAW THEM SENTENCED TO EXECUTION...
NOT everyone arrives in Las Vegas on a mission to let their hair down in the neon-lit party town’s casinos and bars.
Mum-of-three Sandra Sutton-Wasmund was there on business, having journeyed from her native Oregon.
Sandra, 48, co-owned a dress shop, The Dazzled Dame, and had been in Vegas to attend a trade show with her colleague Debbie Tvedt.
She was a woman beloved by her community, a devoted wife who’d fought breast cancer three times in 10 years.
But, as she climbed into a taxi being driven by 62-year-old Michael Boldon, she had no idea it would be the last car ride either of them would ever take.
Over at the upscale Aria resort casino, two men began to row as they waited for their cars in the valet area of the building.
One of the men was self-confessed pimp and
DISPRESPECT: Victim Kenneth Cherry is said to have ingored Ammar Harris known criminal Ammar Harris. The other was aspiring rapper and father-ofthree Kenneth Cherry.
After a brief war of words, Kenneth – aka rapper Kenny Clutch – got into his high-powered Maserati and left, accompanied by a friend.
But, amid a screech of wheels and tyre smoke, Harris took off after him in his blacked-out Range Rover along with his girlfriend Yesenia Alfonso.
The two cars jockeyed for position on the highway before Harris wound down his window, pulled out a gun and began firing.
In the melee, Kenneth, 27, was fatally hit, while his pal suffered a gunshot wound to the arm. The Maserati careered out of control. It sped through the intersection of the Las Vegas Strip and ploughed headlong into the taxi containing Michael and Sandra.
That junction is overlooked by some of Las Vegas’s most famous landmarks: the Bellagio, Caesars Palace, Bally’s and the Flamingo.
It’s also just a stone’s throw from where rapper Tupac Shakur was gunned down on the strip in 1995.
After the road inferno instigated by Harris in February 2013, jurors at his murder trial were shown gruesome images of Michael and Sandra’s charred bodies.
Meanwhile, the family of Kenneth Cherry – who had no criminal record – said that he was “no gangster”, he was just a musician who’d moved to Las Vegas from northern California in order to pursue his dreams as an artist.
Sandra’s husband, James Wasmund, said he had not only lost his best friend and wife, but that their three children had lost their mother.
In a statement the family said: “Sandra’s innocent and tragic loss will be felt by all those who knew and loved her and by the community at large.
“She always radiated compassion and made everyone a better person.
“Her family appreciates the outpouring of love and support and the respect for privacy shown throughout this very difficult time.”
Once the trial was finished and Harris had been handed his death sentence, James added: “We lost a year we don’t even remember. Nobody’s moved. Nobody’s matured.
“We’re not doing well but we’re trying. I just hope she’s proud of us.”
In a truly harrowing, foreboding piece of synchronicity, one of Kenneth’s lyrics had said: “One mistake changes lives, all in one night.”
His mother, Heidi Cherry, brought tears to the jury as she herself wept in the courtroom while trying to explain just what her son meant to her.
She said: “It’s tearing me up. I can’t sleep, I don’t eat.
“I’m a nurse at a trauma centre so every time I hear a siren now… it just tears me up.”
Meanwhile Michael’s sister, Carolyn Trimble, described her brother as a hard-working petrol head who loved watching IndyCar and NASCAR races.
She said: “Everybody just loved him. When that car hit that cab, Mike had to be in there talking and laughing.”
As for the irony that Michael was hit and killed by a gleaming sports car he would have loved to ogle, Carolyn said: “He would be tickled. He’d have said, ‘Damn, of all things – a Maserati hit me, took me out like that’.
“I’m just happy he didn’t suffer.”
In total, five other people were treated for injuries after six-vehicle crash.
So what was it that had triggered the initial fight between Harris and Kenneth?
No-one knows for sure, but prosecutors suspect it was something as simple as the fact that Kenneth ignored Harris while they were together in the club – a slight which Harris found “disrespectful”. the
In court,Chief Deputy District Attorney Pamela Weckerly told jurors: “When Harris feels disrespected, other people pay the consequences.
“The tragedy of this case is that three people are dead simply because of his sense of insult.”
Psychologists told how Harris had been warped and twisted by a hellish upbringing.
Dr Shera
Bradley