Death
On November 9, 2002, Santana was fatally shot one time in the head while sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car in Crenshaw. He was 26 years old. Santana was buried on November 18, 2002 at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.
Damien Andre Gates was later convicted of the first-degree murder of Santana and the attempted murder of another man in the car, and was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences plus 70 years in prison. Brandon Douglas Bynes received a 23-year sentence after pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and assault with a deadly weapon. An officer involved in the case testified that Monique King, reportedly Gates' girlfriend and aged 15 at the time of Santana's death, falsely claimed that Santana had tried to rape her, which prompted Gates and Bynes to attack the car. King received eight years in juvenile custody.
Read more about this topic: Merlin Santana
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)
“The things a man has to have are hope and confidence in himself against odds, and sometimes he needs somebody, his pal or his mother or his wife or God, to give him that confidence. He’s got to have some inner standards worth fighting for or there won’t be any way to bring him into conflict. And he must be ready to choose death before dishonor without making too much song and dance about it. That’s all there is to it.”
—Clark Gable (1901–1960)
“I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)