Rap Label Ex-Staffer Shot Down

A former Death Row Records employee was shot to death Wednesday as he sat in his parked vehicle at Imperial Highway and Vermont Avenue, police and music industry sources said.

Henry Smith, 33, is the third associate of Death Row chief Marion “Suge” Knight to be gunned down in recent years. Smith had worked as a graphic artist for the record company, designing the firm’s logo, a hooded man in an electric chair.

Police said Smith was waiting in his sports utility vehicle while his girlfriend was using a pay phone about 2:30 p.m. when the assailant walked up, leaned into the car and fired five or six shots.

Witnesses said the attacker, a man in his 20s, dropped his pistol, calmly picked it up and then fled on a bicycle. The witnesses said the girlfriend’s infant was in the car but wasn’t hurt.

“It appears to be a senseless, gang-related shooting,” said Officer Jason Lee, a Los Angeles police spokesman.

Death Row officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.

Last April, former Knight associate Alton McDonald, 37, was shot to death as he pumped gas at a service station at Rosecrans and Atlantic avenues. Sheriff’s deputies said the shots were fired from a pickup truck that drove away after the attack. No arrests have been made.

According to court records, McDonald was in Las Vegas with Knight and rap star Tupac Shakur in 1996 when Shakur was slain and Knight wounded in a drive-by shooting near the Strip.

Just hours before Shakur was killed, he, Knight and McDonald had been involved in a hotel lobby scuffle that was captured by the hotel’s surveillance cameras. Knight was jailed as a result of that incident after a judge determined that the rap executive had violated his probation on a previous assault conviction.