Murder of an NFL Star

36-year-old professional football player Steve McNair enjoyed a successful and lucrative career in the NFL. The Houston Oilers drafted him third overall in 1995, and two years later, he was named their regular starting quarterback when the team moved to Nashville and was renamed to the Tennessee Titans. He was given the nickname “Air McNair”, and played a total of 13 seasons in the NFL - 11 for the Titans, and two for the Baltimore Ravens - before he announced his retirement from football in 2007. 

At the time of his retirement, Steve had been married to his wife, Mechelle, for a decade, and the two of them had two sons together. “It’s been a great ride,” he said after his last game. “It’s a sad, emotional day for me…I’m trying to do the best I can to hold it in, but at the same time, I’m opening up a lot more doors for the future. I can become, now, the father I need to be to my kids.” 

However, Steve struggled to cope with moving away from the fame and sense of purpose that professional football had given him. So many pro athletes focus on sports so much from the time they are kids until the time they retire, that once they do retire, they can struggle to fit into the “real world”. One of his former teammates later told the media, “What people fail to realize is that, when you make a transition away from the game - emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually - you go through something. You change, and you’re constantly searching for something.”

Steve never got the chance to adjust to his retirement. Only two years later, on the 4th of July, Steve’s dead body was found in the Nashville condo he rented. He had been shot to death, but he wasn’t alone - lying next to him, there was another dead body belonging to 20-year-old Sahel Kazemi. 

Sahel, who went by the nickname “Jenni”, had lived a difficult life. When she was nine years old, her mother had been violently murdered. As a teenager, she and her family fled their home country of Iran and moved to Florida. Jenni moved away from her family - the only source of support in her life - to live in Nashville with her 20-year-old boyfriend, Keith Norfleet. At the time, Jenni was only 16 years old.

In 2009, Jenni and Keith had recently broken up, but she was still living in Nashville, working as a waitress in a chain restaurant that Steve McNair often visited. It was Dave and Busters at Opry Mills, in case you were wondering. She had become familiar with Steve because he was such a frequent customer, and always made an effort to talk to the staff there. “He was one of the nice guys who would talk to you,” another coworker at the restaurant said. “Not like the other athletes.”

Jenni developed romantic feelings for Steve, and ended up giving him her cell phone number. Despite having a wife and family, Steve started texting Jenni and taking her on expensive dates.​ The nature of their relationship made their different lifestyles obvious - Jenni was a 19-year-old  who worked a minimum wage job, and Steve was a famous athlete in his 30s who owned multiple properties and businesses. He took Jenni with him on luxurious vacations, and when she turned 20, he bought her a new car - a Cadillac Escalade.

Jenni was excited to tell her family back in Florida that one day, she and Steve would get married and buy a house together. While Jenni was smitten with Steve, her family didn’t feel the same way. They were skeptical. None of her family members were fans of the NFL, so they weren’t impressed with Steve’s name, career or status. Mostly, they were concerned by the fact that Steve was married with a family of his own, and didn’t seem to plan on leaving his wife for Jenni.

Steve’s lack of commitment wasn’t the only source of stress in Jenni’s life. When Steve had “gifted” her the Cadillac, he had also arranged for her to make monthly payments on the car, which was in both of their names. Jenni still hadn’t sold her own car, and the costs kept piling up. *

She had been living in an apartment with a roommate, splitting the $1000 monthly rent between the two of them, but then the roommate moved out, leaving Jenni struggling to pay rent.

On the day that he died, Steve received a text from Jenni asking if he loved her, to which he responded, “I love you, baby.” During that same conversation, Jenni confessed to Steve that she was stressed about money and couldn’t afford paying for her cellphone bill. Steve responded by transferring Jenni a total of $2000, and then he went to visit her to check if she was okay.

Despite Steve seeming to go out of his way to take care of Jenni, their relationship had not been easy. Throughout their affair, Steve had been struggling to keep Jenni a secret from his wife, Mechelle. Jenni wanted to be in a serious, monogamous relationship with Steve, but he didn’t feel the same way - in fact, she wasn’t the only woman he was having an affair with. Jenni found used condoms in Steve’s bedroom, and started to stalk the other woman that she believed he was seeing. As she became more and more pushy, repeatedly calling Steve when he was spending time with his family, Steve had become distant. He tried to pull back from the relationship, but he never stopped seeing her entirely.

Only two days before Steve and Jenni died, Jenni had been pulled over by the Nashville police and arrested for drunk driving. She was driving a black Cadillac - the car that Steve bought for her 20th birthday - and Steve was sitting in the passenger seat. As the officers arrested Jenni and escorted her to the police car, Jenni repeatedly begged for Steve to come to the police car to speak with her. However, Steve wasn’t under arrest, so instead of talking to Jenni, he called a taxi and left the scene. Later that day, he paid Jenni’s bail… and immediately after she was released from jail, she went to buy a gun.

Investigators were left with two dead bodies, and no survivors to immediately tell them who had pulled the trigger, and why. The murder weapon - a 9mm gun - was found underneath Jenni Kazemi’s body, and forensic testing found gunpowder residue on the fingers and palm of her left hand. Unlike Jenni, who had been shot in the head at close range, Steve had been shot three times from a distance of more than three feet away, as well as one final shot at point-blank range. Because of the positioning of his body and the gunshot wounds, Steve was believed to have been asleep when he was killed.

The forensic evidence allowed the police to reach a conclusion: the deaths were a murder-suicide, where Jenni shot Steve to death, and then sat down on the couch next to his body, and committed suicide with the same gun. It appeared that she sat next to him hoping that she would fall sideways and die lying in his lap, but instead, she had fallen to the floor. 

The investigation into the case was studied by retired FBI Gregg McCrary, who had more than ten years’ experience working in the Bureau’s behavioral science unit. Gregg came to the same conclusion as the police - that Jenni killed Steve because of stress that came from their relationship, and her financial situation.

Gregg didn’t believe that Steve’s murder had been spontaneous. From Jenni’s cell phone records, and her decision to buy a gun, it appeared that she had decided that she was going to kill Steve before she even met up with him that night. She had also shot him a total of four times - even though every one of the wounds would have been fatal on its own. “To me, shooting him more than once is kind of that revenge thing,” Gregg said. “When we have something like this, when we deal with overkill, there’s more emotion. It’s more affective, more rage, more getting even… whatever that [motive] may be.” She hadn’t just wanted to hurt Steve - she had shot him repeatedly, beginning when he was asleep on the couch, because she was determined to end his life.

The rest of the crime scene details supported Gregg McCrary’s belief that the murder had been an act of revenge and possession. “This certainly looks like an attempt at posing,” he said, agreeing that Jenni had planned on dying in Steve’s lap. “She’s dressed in all this pink, which is very feminine [...] and trying to have her body on his. It’s as though it’s a symbolic kind of possession.”

The day before she killed Steve, Jenni had talked with a friend about the stress in her life. “My life is a ball of shit,” she had said. “I should just end it.”