The last sound Lorenzen Wright ever made was a frantic, garbled call to a 9-1-1 dispatcher, a desperate plea captured on tape that was ignored for nine critical days. In the background, the rapid-fire crack of eleven gunshots echoed through the night, a chilling soundtrack to a murder that would take over a decade to unravel. The voice on the line was that of the 34-year-old former NBA player, a man who had once soared to professional heights but had spiraled into a world of financial ruin and fractured personal ties.
The call, initially dismissed as a hang-up by a dispatcher who failed to report it, became the first brittle thread in a tapestry of deceit, greed, and cold-blooded conspiracy that police would spend years trying to pull.
The body of Lorenzen Wright was discovered on July 28, 2010, ten days after he vanished, lying in a grassy, remote patch of southeast Shelby County, Tennessee, near a road known as Callis Cutoff. So severe was the decomposition from the oppressive summer heat that he weighed just 57 pounds, making visual identification nearly impossible. An autopsy revealed a brutal scene: the father of seven had been shot at least five times, with two bullets in his head and two in his chest, and bullet fragments in his right forearm.
Investigators found two different types of shell casings at the scene, suggesting the possibility of two murder weapons, but no guns were ever recovered from the immediate vicinity.
The initial hours of the investigation were marked by devastating failure. The 9-1-1 call that had captured Lorenz’s final moments was not reported by the dispatcher to her supervisor, nor was the call tracked to pinpoint its origin. This catastrophic oversight, which would eventually result in a payout to the Wright family by the city of Germantown, effectively lost law enforcement their best chance at an early breakthrough.
It was only days later, once friends and family had listed him as a missing person, that authorities connected the anguished call to the missing man and finally rushed to the foliage where his remains were discovered.
In the wake of his death, the life Lorenzen had built and was desperately trying to hold onto came into sharper, more tragic focus. The couple’s marriage had imploded, ending in a tense, final divorce in 2010, but sources claimed they remained intimately connected, a bond frayed by allegations of infidelity and crushing debt. In the years leading up to his death, Lorenzen had lost his 17-room custom home and a 1million dollar Atlanta residence.
He was in arrears on monthly alimony and child support payments, his fortune largely given away to friends, family, and charitable causes. Despite his struggles, he was planning a comeback, scheduling a tryout with an NBA team and a flight to Israel to play there, but traces of a darker sides of his life were emerging, tinged with suggestions of cash deals and a shadowy phone call, leaving him carrying a “considerable sum” of money and “a box of drugs” out of his ex-wife’s home on the night of his killing.
His former wife, Shara Wright, was the one who told police that version of that final night, claiming Lorenzen left her home with a random man and a phone call made to an unknown recipient, to “flip something for 110 dollars.” This statement fueled immediate speculation of a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 deal gone wrong, a narrative that would be thrown into chaos as the case moved through its darkest phases. Those close to him, like his friend and roommate Michael, recalled that Lorenzen seemed on edge in his final weeks, but he was excited to see his children.
He had flown to Memphis on July 18, with plans to attend a family baby shower and watch his son, but after leaving Shara’s house late that night, he was, for all intents and purposes, erased from the world of the living.
After his body was found, the public mourning was profound. Hundreds of fans and former teammates flooded the FedExForum, the home of the Memphis Grizzlies, for a memorial service where four of his five surviving children wore hats from different NBA teams to honor his 13-season career. Questions swirled with no answers.
As each day turned into months and years, the case went cold, with police struggling against a climate of fear and silence. A combined reward of $21,000 was offered, but few tips came in. In the background, disturbing rumors bubbled up about a secret love triangle, a plot from within his own family, and a long-awaited report from a convict in prison that would shockingly point to the guns in east Mississippi.
That convict was Jimmy Martin, and his attention was the first truly major crack in the perfect story. In 2012, Martin, in prison on an unrelated crime, reached out to the FBI claiming he had information about the killing. The crucial piece of evidence, a gun, was recovered from a lake near Walnut, Mississippi, in 2017, and famously, brought and dubbed “Operation Rebound” by Major Lee Davis.
“In basketball, when you get a rebound, you get a second chance,” Davis said, claiming the finding was a second chance to bring closure to the grieving family for the death of their loved one. The gun was traced to a man named Billy Ray Turner, and an indictment for first-degree murder was handed down in November 2017. Turner was a church deacon, a landscaper who had done yard work for Shara Wright, and the subject of rumors surrounding an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with her.
Then, on December 19, 2017, the investigation took an even more stunning turn. Shara Wright, who had long insisted on her innocence, was arrested in Riverside, California, in connection with her ex-husband’s murder. The former couple’s broken and public life, complete with threats, infidelity, and financial war, was painted in full by the criminal case.
The evidence against her mounted, culminating in a plea deal in 2019. Shara Wright entered a guilty plea to the lesser charge of facilitation of first-degree murder and attempt to facilitate first-degree murder, avoiding a first-degree murder conviction. As part of the deal, a judge sentenced her to 30 years in prison, but she would be eligible for parole after just nine years, a sentencing consideration that infuriated all who loved her husband.
In a startling turn of full confession under courtroom, the presence of his secret scheme became public. Prosecutors revealed that Shara, the “mastermind,” had orchestrated an earlier murder plot in Atlanta, where she had left a window unlocked for his her cousin and the murderer, Billy Turner, to barge in and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her ex-husband. That attempt failed when they reached the home and realized they were home, but the second time, in Memphis, on the desolate road in southeast Memphis, the ambush was successful.
While officer was testing his gun, a’ that he had planned the murder with Shara’s help, using her metal detector to find the gun that had been thrown, collecting the call, and plotting to make it look like a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 hit.
After her guilty plea, the case against Billy Turner went to trial. During the proceeding, the courtroom was riddled with explosive testimony from Jimmy Martin, as well as that of many witnesses. Martin told the court that after the murder, Shara had told him, “the plan went through and she had lost one of the guns,” and that both she and Turner had shot dismounted officer, the ambush.
On the stand, the brutal sequence of events that was 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭. Details emerged that Lorenzen had been initially shot near his car, jumped a fence, fled for his life while being chased, was caught and gunned down. The defense attacked each piece of evidence, pointing out inconsistencies in Martin’s story, but the jury was moved by the pile of proof in a case woven with betrayal.
Finally, in March 2022, after a three-week trial and only a few hours of deliberation, a jury found Billy Ray Turner guilty of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, and criminal attempt first-degree murder in relation to the 2010 killing. Turnner was subsequently handed a life sentence. While he was been found guilty, the sense of justice was far from complete for the family.
Donna, Lorenzen’s mother, and his father Hector mourned the loss of her relationship with her other children, effectively estranged due to the legal fight and the conviction of their bond. Indeed, the children of the marriage were placed with relatives, leaving a rift that time has yet to fully heal, a family torn apart not just by death, but by mother’s role in it.
The legacy of Lorenzen Wright is not without its shadows. Once a rising NBA star with a gentle personality and a vast heart of gold, his life was drastically cut short in a case that died not on the road, but in the courtroom. The degree to which his own ex-wife and her paramour contributed to his untimely end, and his financial ruin, is a chilling study of human greed and obsession.
The shooter’s identity remains a matter of complete closure, and while Shara’s imprisonment and Turner’s guilt have provided a measure of relief, the full answer to why a father was taken so brutally from his family may very well be that he was worth more dead than alive. Even now, the family unit he fought so hard to maintain has been irrevocably fractured by the murder and the bitter quest for revenge.
