Woman held in connection with Porter killing

(AP) - A prostitute who allegedly brought former Villanova basketball star Howard Porter to her St. Paul apartment for sex on the night he was badly beaten was the second person being held Wednesday in his death.

The woman, 33-year-old Tonya Evette Johnson, was recorded as saying she wasn't "losing any sleep or getting any gray hair" over Porter's death, according to court documents.

She was arrested Tuesday and booked for aiding and abetting in Porter's murder, said St. Paul police spokesman Tom Walsh. Ramsey County prosecutors have until noon Thursday to charge her in the case.

Interviews with Johnson, also known as Tonya Evette Washington, were described in a criminal complaint that charged Rashad Arthur Raleigh, 29, with second-degree murder in Porter's death.

Prosecutors believe Raleigh was one of four masked men who rushed into the woman's apartment and demanded drugs and money when Porter was there on May 18.

Porter, a probation officer for Ramsey County, died a week after he was found unconscious in a Minneapolis alley. Porter was not the probation officer for Raleigh or Johnson and he was off duty on the night he was beaten, said Chris Crutchfield, spokesman for Ramsey County Community Corrections.

"The focus here is really on bringing the people who did this to justice," Crutchfield said. "Howard was one of us, and he was brutally, brutally murdered."

According to the criminal complaint, Johnson told police she was street walking near her apartment when she approached Porter for a "date." She had not met Porter before that night, she said, and she brought him to her apartment to exchange sex for money and crack cocaine.

Johnson told investigators that four masked men rushed into her apartment, threw her to the floor, and demanded money and drugs from Porter.

Johnson told police the four men beat Porter "real bad, God real bad" with their fists and feet and that "there was blood everywhere," the complaint said. Police said they found blood spattered throughout the house.

According to the complaint, Raleigh was one of those men.

The investigation is ongoing, Walsh said.

Porter disappeared the night of May 18 after leaving his St. Paul home. He was found in Minneapolis the next morning, without identification and badly injured.

Authorities didn't know at the time that the assault victim brought to the hospital was Porter, and he remained hospitalized until he died. His car was found in St. Paul.

According to the complaint, Raleigh told someone who had made a series of calls from the Ramsey County Workhouse to Johnson's address in late May that Porter had "rushed" him and "didn't go along with the program."

Raleigh allegedly said in those calls that he robbed Porter because he needed money, but that Johnson had come up with the idea. Calls by workhouse inmates are routinely recorded.

Porter was a standout at Villanova, leading the Wildcats to the 1971 NCAA championship game and was selected outstanding player of the tournament despite the Wildcats' loss to UCLA in the final. But he was stripped of his award and the team's accomplishments were wiped from the record books after it was learned he had begun dealing with an agent before the season ended.

Porter was drafted 32nd overall by the Chicago Bulls in 1971 and played seven professional seasons including stints with Detroit and New York but never achieved the success he had in college.

He became addicted to drugs and estranged from his school and former teammates, but turned his life around. He came to Minnesota for drug treatment, decided to stay and became a probation officer for Ramsey County in 1995.

Porter returned to Villanova when the school retired his No. 54 jersey in 1997, and his funeral was held in a small gothic church on the school's expansive campus.

It was not clear whether Porter had suffered a relapse at the time of his death.

Those who worked with Porter said he often used his past struggle with drugs to show his probation clients that they, too, could turn their lives around.

"I know that he understood the struggle that people went through and was willing to give them time to sort things out and work it through," Rhonda Rhoades, supervisor of Ramsey County Probation, said in an interview before the arrests.

In that interview, Rhoades said some of Porter's clients stayed clean because they didn't want to let him down, and that many missed his support.

Rhoades said she was glad someone was arrested in the "brutal, heinous crime," but she wouldn't comment on the details alleged in the criminal complaint.

"Of course this is a very emotional situation for those who knew and loved Howard and as such we want to continue to check in with each other to make sure we're all doing OK," Crutchfield said Wednesday.

Officials at Villanova had no comment about the arrests.

Raleigh was being held Wednesday in lieu of $500,000 bail. His next court date was scheduled for Sept. 17.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)