Former ECU football player Anthony Domonique Lennon was killed outside a Raleigh restaurant last June because a drug courier he had hired to travel from the West Coast to North Carolina lost the drugs in a Chicago arrest, Raleigh police detectives said in 28 newly disclosed search warrants.
The warrants also show that police believe a man who they say helped finance the drug deal set up Lennon, 33, for the hit outside the Bahama Breeze on Wake Forest Road on the night of June 23.
Five people have been charged in Lennon’s killing, and police are looking for a sixth.
Wantavius Burney Jackson
CCBI
One of the search warrants asked permission to take a DNA sample from Wantavius Burney Jackson of Kinston so a laboratory could compare it with DNA found on shell casings found in the packing lot. Jackson was charged in October with conspiring to murder Lennon.
The only person charged with murder is Ashanti Bennett, who police said helped finance the drug deal along with another man known only by a nickname.
Ashantee Rahdee Bennett
CCBI
The theory laid out in search warrant applications by Detective J.L. Zellmer has Bennett and Lennon going into the Bahama Breeze parking lot together and standing by Lennon’s black Range Rover when “multiple suspects” came up to the pair and shot Lennon several times.
Sources who knew Lennon told police that he had hired a woman to carry the drugs from Seattle, Wash., to North Carolina.
Police did not disclose in the warrants what drug or drugs were involved in the deal or how the woman was traveling when she was stopped in Chicago.
Authorities in Chicago backed up the story about the arrest, Zellmer wrote.
The search warrants returned to the court clerk’s office Tuesday were for nine telephones accounts, eight cars, five social media accounts, a computer, a security camera and a residence in Charlotte, one in Raleigh and a tattoo parlor Bennet owns in Greenville.
Lennon was a defensive back for the ECU Pirates from 2011 to 2015.
He had moved to the Raleigh area from Suffolk, Va., where his family lives and where he was buried.
Lennon, known as Domo to his teammates, earned three letters while playing for the Pirates.