Las Vegas Strip shooting suspect resists extradition to Nevada

LOS ANGELES — Minutes before an extradition hearing Thursday for the suspect in a Las Vegas Strip shooting, a man he had never met sat in the courtroom with tears spilling down his cheeks.

Tehran Boldon, the brother of one victim, spoke of the toll the attack took on his family and about the wave of gun violence sweeping the country.

“If it wasn’t that my brother was killed on the Strip, no one would have noticed,” Boldon said. “Thousands of people are killed by gun violence every year. I never felt it before this. It was like it couldn’t happen to our family.

“Now I feel for all victims of violent crime and gun violence,” he said.

During the brief hearing, a Los Angeles judge formally identified 26-year-old Ammar Harris as the suspect wanted in the attack and chain-reaction car crash last month that killed three people.

Harris appeared in court in shackles and a blue jail uniform. He refused to waive extradition and his public defender asked that authorities produce a governor’s warrant to authorize his removal to Nevada.

Superior Court Judge Shelly Torrealba scheduled a status hearing for April 12. Officials have 90 days to secure the warrant.

Officials from Clark County, Nev., were in court and said they would return when Harris is approved for extradition.

Harris is suspected of firing fatal shots from his Range Rover into a Maserati driven by Kenneth Wayne Cherry, an aspiring rapper who called himself Kenny Clutch.

The men were said to have argued outside a hotel. Cab driver Michael Boldon, 62, died in a fiery chain reaction car crash set off when the shooting occurred.

After Cherry was shot, his car careened into the taxi and exploded in a spectacular fireball. Cherry, Boldon and taxi passenger Sandra Sutton-Wasmund., 48, of Maple Valley, Wash., were killed.

Harris was arrested in Los Angeles after a weeklong manhunt that began following the Feb. 21 shooting and crash that also injured five people.