Death
Morgan was murdered in the early hours of February 19, 1972, at Slugs', a jazz club in New York City's East Village where his band was performing. Following an altercation between sets, Morgan's common-law wife Helen More (a.k.a. Morgan), shot him in the chest onstage, killing him within moments. He was 33 years old. According to an eye witness, Miss More (13 years his senior) walked out of the club just before the last set. She returned and the band was already on stage. Lee was trying to get up there, but was talking with some people. He just started to get up the stage, when she entered and called his name. He turned around and she shot him in the heart. She then turned the gun on the club's doorman Ernie Holman, who grabbed her wrist and took the gun away from her. She started to scream "Baby, what have I done?" and ran to him. She was later arrested, tried, sentenced, and paroled by 1978. Soon after, Helen Morgan returned to her native North Carolina. Reportedly she never spoke publicly of the incident, until she granted an interview a month before her death. She died in Wilmington, NC, from a heart condition, in March 1996.
Read more about this topic: Lee Morgan
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“and so this tree—
Oh, that such our death may be!—
Died in sleep, and felt no pain,
To live in happier form again:
From which, beneath Heaven’s fairest star,
The artist wrought this loved guitar;”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)