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Armen Keteyian: “I’m still trying to find the evidence that puts the gun in her hand.”
When the tragic news of Steve McNair’s death broke this summer, something didn’t quite seem right. The public was privy to the fact that Steve McNair was involved in some extramarital affairs with a young and seemingly unstable woman, but myself and other football fans were more or less willing to accept at face value what we read about the situation – that being that a mistress of McNair’s shot him then took her own life over money issues. Turns out there might have been more to the story than just that.Veteran CBS Sports journalist Armen Keteyian has been investigating the case since then . Keteyian joined 106.7 The Fan in Washington D.C. to talk about his investigative work on the casebehind the scenes since McNair’s death on July 4th.
On how many hours he think he spent on it personally compared to the police
“That’s a good question. It’s safe to say I spent hundreds of hours. I think I made at least four, probably five trips to Nashivlle. And if you count the sleepless nights rolling around in my head trying to figure out what the next step would be in the reporting or the questions I was going to ask some individual or how I would find an individual or how I would get them to talk to me, it was a lot of time. But you know what, it’s an important story and it’s the kind of story that I have the capability of doing because of CBS News and the resources of the network and my experience. And I guess you could say there’s very few places now where this kind of story, once it’s reported, you can go back, uncover, and dig into it and hold people accountable for what they have described as their conclusions in the case.”
On what aspect of the case provoked him to dig deeper:
“I’ve got a 20 year old daughter and when I look at my daughter and her personality against Jenny Kazemi and her personality, it was just like this just doesn’t make sense where a 20-year old girl who turns out had never really held a gun in her life in her hand and really hated to watch horror movies. I mean, she really just wasn’t that kind of individual who’d shoot somebody four times in this sort of execution style murder. And then when you started to sort of pull the threads of what the time line was and how they screwed up with her work schedule and how that impacted a critical aspect of the case. Then when we were able to get a look at her bank records that showed yes she had $500 in her account early on July 3rd but Steve transferred her $2000 in to her account that day. But the case really guys shifted for me – and I never would have done those two parts on the Early Show if I did not get access to Jenny’s cell phone records and that I was able to get from the father, the cell phone number from Adrian Gilliam Jr, the convicted felon who allegedly sold her the weapon. And when we matched the two numbers and saw the 200+ communications – the text messages and the phone calls….that’s when the story sort of went in to another gear for me and where I felt comfortable reporting the facts of the case rather than what I think frankly, the Nashville Police Department, I’m still trying to find the evidence that puts the gun in her hand. They don’t have any evidence – at least publicly – that puts that murder weapon in her hand.”
On if there’s any paper trail that shows what was said between Jenny Kazemi and Gilliam via text:
“No we don’t. All they have now really is Gilliam and that’s the reason Gilliam is sitting in jail still without bond on a charge that normally felony in possession of a weapon and sale of a weapon, you would have been bonded out and would have been awaiting trial by now. But they’re keeping him there frankly, to their credit, they know they have a lot of answered questions. And I interviewed Gilliam in jail and he’s not coughing up anything about his involvement in this case, I can tell you that, at least he wasn’t to me.”
On how long he believes Kazemi and Gilliam had a relationship:
“Well, we have her cell records from June 14th through July 14th essentially, and what we have them back is three weeks. And in the three weeks leading up to the death, there were 203 text or phone communications between the two of them, 49 the day that the gun was allegedly sold. And what’s interesting to me is – and I’d like an answer to this question, they’re only going to get it from Gilliam – what were they talking about at on the early hours of July 4th when Gilliam called her and they spoke for three minutes two hours before these murders allegedly took place. And if you look at that case summary, one of the more intriguing things to me is Jenny says she is leaving the front door open for McNair. So, you know, is the front door open – what was going on between Kazemi and Gilliam when there was so any calls? Is that when she bought the gun? I don’t know? But it’s not my job to know, it’s my job to raise questions. It’s the Nashville Police’s job now to answer some of these questions and not hide behind the fact that we can’t say anything because he’s going to be sentenced on December18th. Well then we’ll just wait until December 18th and ask all these questions I guess.”
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