Jury quickly convicts Ammar Harris in Strip shooting that left three dead

A Clark County jury took less than 30 minutes Monday to convict Ammar Harris of killing three people on the Strip.

Tehran Boldon, whose brother Michael Boldon was slain, walked out of the courtroom with a smile on his face after a clerk read the verdict.

"It didn't take long for them to see what we all knew," Boldon said. "He's done. That's it. No more Ammar Harris. And we can find closure. I didn't think there would be closure for me, but I'm starting to feel that. I'm starting to feel the weight leave. So I'm very happy for that."

Prosecutors said the self-identified pimp fired five shots in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 21, 2013, because he felt disrespected.

The first bullet struck Kenny "Clutch" Cherry Jr., who had been driving a Maserati alongside Harris's Range Rover. Prosecutors said Harris thought he was shooting at a man whom he had quarreled with just moments before at Aria.

After Cherry was shot, he crashed his car into a taxi, causing a fiery explosion that killed driver Michael Boldon and his passenger, Sandra Sutton-Wasmund of Maple Valley, Wash. A passenger in Clutch's Maserati suffered a minor gunshot wound and survived.

"When (Harris) feels disrespected, other people pay the consequences," Chief Deputy District Attorney Pamela Weckerly told jurors. "The tragedy of this case is that three people are dead simply because of his sense of insult."

After more than two hours of closing arguments, the jury of eight women and four men returned guilty verdicts on 11 charges: three counts of murder with use of a deadly weapon, one count of attempted murder with use of a deadly weapon, two counts of discharging a firearm into a vehicle, and five counts of discharging a firearm out of a vehicle.

The same panel is slated to determine next week whether Harris should be sentenced to death.

Moments before the shooting, near the Aria valet, Harris flashed a wad of cash to show that he was "somebody," and "I got money, too," Chief Deputy District Attorney David Stanton said.

Harris had quarreled outside the former Haze nightclub with a man.

When pulled alongside Clutch in the Maserati, Harris asked "What's popping?"

"The answer is, 'I don't know you,'" Stanton said.

Harris took that as an insult.

Defense attorneys tried to show that someone else at the Aria had waved a gun and that Harris felt his life was being threatened.

Harris endured a "very real, very reasonable fear that he was about to be shot," lawyer Tom Ericsson said.

But instead of driving away from the Maserati, Harris cut the vehicle off and drove next to it at a stoplight on the Strip before firing from his .40-caliber handgun. Police never found a weapon in the Maserati.

"The only potential danger he was facing was maybe a bruised ego," Weckerly said.

Cherry's father, Ken Cherry Sr., said his son had been wrongly painted as a pimp in media reports after the shooting. That allegation, he said, came from a "disgruntled girlfriend."

Cherry called the verdict "justice as promised."

Contact reporter David Ferrara at dferrara@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039. Find him on Twitter: @randompoker