In the early hours of April 18, 1994, the burgeoning career of a promising eighteen-year-old male rapper from New Orleans, Edgar Givens, known professionally as Pimp Daddy, was violently extinguished. Givens was discovered in a third-floor apartment in the Florida Projects, having sustained multiple gunshot wounds to his head. Police officers, responding to a call about an aggravated battery around 5:30 a.m., found the front door of the apartment partially open and saw Givens seated upright on a sofa, his head back, and his arms folded.
The investigation into the shooting quickly pointed to a suspect named Rodney Temple. It was suggested that the motive for the killing may have stemmed from a dispute involving a woman. Shortly after the incident, Temple was indicted for the second-degree murder of Edgar Givens on June 2, 1994. He entered a plea of not guilty later that month.
Following a jury trial, Rodney Temple was found guilty as charged on April 22, 1996. The court subsequently sentenced him to a mandatory term of life imprisonment at hard labor, without the possibility of probation, parole, or suspension of sentence. The conviction brought a legal conclusion to the tragic and abrupt end of a young artist's life, a life that had shown considerable promise in the New Orleans bounce music scene.
