Monday, July 17, 2000
Man charged in athlete's shooting was UK student
Police call 1994 slaying revenge killing
The Associated Press
LEXINGTON — For six long years, Trent DiGiuro's family waited for answers. Why did a sniper target their son, a football player and honor student at the University of Kentucky, in the darkness as he sat on his front porch celebrating his 21st birthday?
Police sifted through clue after clue, only to come away empty-handed. But Friday, just a few days before the anniversary of Mr. DiGiuro's death, police finally made an arrest.
Another UK student, Shane Ragland, 27, is charged with DiGiuro's death. Mr. Ragland was arrested Friday and is being held in the Fayette County Detention Center on $1 million full cash bond.
“It's a relief to have something happen finally,” said Mike DiGiuro, Trent's father, who lives in Goshen. “It will be good to know the who and the why and that sort of stuff ... but we're in for a long haul.”
Mike DiGiuro said Saturday that police had not talked to the family about the motive and he has never heard of Mr. Ragland. In fact, he learned of the arrest on television. But in court records, police outline the who and why — a bizarre, three-year chain of events, including a boast of sexual conquest, a fraternity blackball and finally, a revenge killing.
Police allege Mr. Ragland seethed with rage for three years after Trent DiGiuro helped get Mr. Ragland blackballed from a fraternity after Mr. Ragland boasted of having sex with a ranking fraternity member's girlfriend. Finally, Mr. Ragland acted on his anger on July 17, 1994, according to police documents filed after Mr. Ragland's arrest Friday afternoon.
An apparent break came for Lexington police in January when a former girlfriend of Mr. Ragland told them that Mr. Ragland confessed the murder to her in 1995 — just nine months after the slaying, court records show.
According to the affidavit, the woman and police arranged a meeting between her and Mr. Ragland. When they met on Wednesday, she was wearing a concealed microphone so police could listen to their conversation and record it. In the conversation, Mr. Ragland at no time denied his involvement in the murder.
Police also recovered a high-powered .243-caliber rifle from Mr. Ragland's home in Frankfort, said Joseph Famularo, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, who was investigating an unrelated tip of drug activity from Lexington Police. Police had said a high-powered rifle, thought to be a .243-caliber, was used in the sniper-style slaying.
Tests will be conducted to determine if the rifle could have been used in the murder, Mr. Famularo said.
Mr. Ragland's family has hired Frankfort lawyer William E. Johnson to defend him. Mr. Johnson said Mr. Ragland, the son of a prosperous, well-connected Frankfort businessman who is a financial contributor to Gov. Paul Patton, will plead innocent when he is arraigned today at noon, six years after Mr. DiGiuro's murder.
“The young fella says he's not guilty and that's why we're going to plead him not guilty,” Mr. Johnson said. “The Ragland family is not the kind of family to ambush people.”
Mr. Ragland has had several brushes with the law dating to 1991, most of them involving alcohol. He returned from an alcohol rehabilitation program in Florida about a month ago.
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