Defendant absent from penalty phase of fatal Strip shooting, crash trial

By Ken Ritter, Associated Press

Published Monday, Nov. 2, 2015 | 12:34 p.m.

Updated Monday, Nov. 2, 2015 | 8:26 p.m.

With the defendant absent from the penalty phase of his trial, jurors began hearing Monday from prosecutors and family members of three people killed in a shooting and fiery crash on the Las Vegas Strip.

Ammar Asim Faruq Harris's life will be in hands of the jury being asked to impose the death penalty after finding the self-styled pimp guilty a week ago of three counts of murder in the spectacular pre-dawn carnage on Feb. 21, 2013. Witnesses compared it with a scene from a Hollywood action film.

Clark County District Judge Kathleen Delaney told the panel that Harris exercised his choice to be absent, and they can't hold the decision against him.

Prosecutor David Stanton told jurors that now that they found 29-year-old Harris guilty, they would hear how he was consistently violent and had a history of injuring and threatening girlfriends.

He also had prior felony convictions in a weapon case in South Carolina in 2004 and for bribing a Nevada prison guard to smuggle cellphones to him last year.

"What happened that night is not an aberration," Stanton said. "It is consistent with who Ammar Harris is as an adult."

Stanton didn't tell jurors the reason Harris is serving 16 years to life for his conviction in 2013 of raping and robbing an 18-year-old woman at a Las Vegas condominium. That case is being appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court.

Defense attorney Robert Langford said he'll bring in a forensic psychologist to describe an upbringing in Brooklyn, New York, that put Harris on a path to violence and crime. Harris also lived in Atlanta and Miami.

"Not an excuse. Something to take into account," Langford said. "The defense believes the appropriate sentence is not death."

No one disputed during his weeklong trial that Harris was the shooter.

The jury learned that he argued with a man at a hip-hop concert at the Aria resort, and viewed taxi dashboard video showing shots fired from a black Range Rover with Harris at the wheel into a Maserati on neon-lit Las Vegas Boulevard.

Although police found no gun in the wrecked Maserati, and no bullet holes were found in the Range Rover, Harris' lawyers maintained the shooting was self-defense.

Aspiring rapper Kenneth Wayne Cherry Jr. died in the Maserati. A passenger, Freddy Walters, was wounded. The sports car then crashed into a taxi that erupted in flames, killing cab driver Michael Boldon and passenger Sandra Sutton-Wasmund of Maple Valley, Wash.

Harris grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and lived in Miami and Atlanta. He fled Las Vegas the day after the shooting, and was arrested a week later in Los Angeles.

A Las Vegas police detective, Terri Miller, told the jury that Harris was recorded on a jail telephone in Los Angeles in apparently trying to get girlfriend Yenesis Alfonso to hire an armed assault team for $20,000 to ambush the van in which he was transferred in custody to Las Vegas in March 2013.

Harris said he wanted to escape to Cuba or Mexico, Miller said.

Alfonso and another former Harris girlfriend testified that he punched, choked and threatened them with hot clothing irons held close to their faces.

Courtney Harper said she was terrified when Harris appeared to load a new revolver with a bullet, spun the cartridge, pursued her when she tried to hide in the bathroom, and put the gun to her head before pulling the trigger.

"He asked me if I trusted him," Harper testified. "After, he told me it was just a joke."

Alfonso recalled once being hospitalized in Miami with two broken ribs, and testified that she couldn't count the number of times Harris attacked her.