True Crime Collection

Lorenzen Wright

Lorenzen Wirght born November 4th, 1975, was an American professional basketball player who played thirteen seasons in the NBA. He was drafted 7th overall in the 1996 NBA draft by the Los Angeles Clippers, and also played for the Atlanta Hawks, Memphis Grizzlies, Sacramento Kings and Cleveland Cavaliers.

Raised in Oxford, Mississippi, Lorenzen played for Lafayette high school in Mississippi before moving to Memphis where he spent his senior year playing for Booker T. Washington High School. He played all levels of basketball in Memphis - high school, collegiate and professional. His father, Herb, was a professional basketball player who competed in Finland and once had a tryout with the Utah Jazz. When Lorenzen was 7 years old, Herb was working for the Memphis Police Department when he was paralysed by a gunshot to the back.

Lorenzen founded the Sierra Simone Wright Scholarship Fund after the death of his infant daughter in March 2003. During the summer of 2003, he returned to the University of Memphis to finish his degree.

During his first stint in Atlanta, Lorenzen and three other Memphis-native NBA players provided financial assistance to Travis Butler, a Memphis orphan whose tragic story garnered national attention.

According to his ex-wife, Lorenzen left his home in Collierville, Tennessee, on the night of July 18th, 2010, with drugs and an unspecified amount of money, and was not seen or heard from again. His family filed a missing persons report on July 22nd. After Lorenzen's body was found on July 28th in a wooded area on Callis Cutoff Road just west of Hacks Cross Road, it was reported that a 911 call had been received from his cell phone in the early morning of July 19th by the Germantown, Tennessee, 911 dispatch centre; the caller was speaking with the dispatcher when 11 gunshots rang out. The dispatcher did not report the call to his supervisor until 8 days later, hindering the police investigation and resulting in a payout to Lorenzen's family. The case was investigated as a homicide. Lorenzen's body is buried in Calvary Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. In 2011, a reward for information related to the killing stood at $21,000: the state of Tennessee contributed $10,000, the city of Memphis and the Memphis Grizzlies each promised $5,000, and Crime Stoppers promised $1,000.

On November 9th, 2017, the gun believed to have been used to murder Lorenzen was found in a Walnut, Mississippi, Lake. On December 5th, 2017, Billy R Turner, Shelby County landscaper and church deacon at Mt. Olive No.1 Missionary Baptist Church in Collierville, TN, was indicted on first-degree murder charges and held on $1 million bond.

On December 15th, 2017, Lorenzen's ex-wife, Sherra Wright-Robinson, was arrested in California in connection with the murder, Sherra was a former member of Billy's church. Lorenzen's mother, Deborah Marion, told The Commercial Appeal newspaper that a police official told her Sherra will be charged with first-degree murder, the same charge Billy faces. Deborah said she believes her former daughter-in-law was motivated by money, specifically a $1-million life insurance policy held by Lorenzen Wright.

In a 2015 article in The Commercial Appeal, Sherra explained how she inquired early in the investigation whether she was a suspect. "They was like, no, you know," she said. "It was just kind of a person of interest. They said that the list was long and wide and they didn't have any real suspects, if you want to quote that."

Records showed that on August 1st, 2010,  Memphis police searched her home and found burned pieces of metal and a letter addressed to her and Lorenzen Wright, but law enforcement at the time did not say what the items meant to investigators.

In 2014, Sherra agreed to a confidential settlement of a dispute in Circuit Court over  how she spent the $1 million of insurance money meant to benefit their six children. On July 25th, 2019, Sherra pleaded guilty to facilitation of first-degree murder in the shooting death of Lorenzen Wright and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.