Born: Feb. 14, 1973 in Mount Olive, Mississippi
Nickname: Air McNair
College career: Alcorn State 1991-94. Highlights: Had 14,496 career passing yards for 119 TDs and 16,823 total yards, both FCS yardage records. In his senior season, he won the Walter Payton Award for I-AA player of the year and was third in Heisman Trophy voting before being selected No. 3 overall in the 1995 NFL Draft by the Houston Oilers.
NFL career: Oilers/Titans 1995-2005; Ravens 2006-07. Highlights: Had 31,304 career passing yards for 174 TDs; 3,590 rushing yards for 37 TDs. Led Titans to four playoff appearances, reaching the 2000 Super Bowl XXXIV before falling to the Rams 23-16. He was a three-time Pro Bowl selection and the 2003 co-Most Valuable Player along with Peyton Manning of the Colts.
Died: July 4, 2009 in Nashville. Buried in Prentiss, Mississippi.
Circumstances: Metro Police case file concludes McNair died in a murder-suicide after being shot four times by Sahel (Jenni) Kazemi, once in each temple and twice in the chest before she killed herself. Find both the McNair autopsy report and the police case file at http://www.autopsyfiles.org/smcnair.htm
Major media treatment: Immediate coverage was both extensive and enormous in 2009, but the case has drawn considerable attention since in the form of newspaper anniversary look-backs, two books by former Nashville policeman Vincent Hill (“Playbook to a Murder’’ and “Incomplete Pass’’), podcasts and TV shows. Notable productions are NBC Dateline’s hour-long TV show “The Mysterious Death of a Titan” in 2010 and Sports Illustrated’s nine-part 2018 narrative podcast, which debuted Oct. 17, “Fall of a Titan: The Steve McNair Story.”
Timeline of events surrounding the murder
Compiled by Tom Wood