The New York Post e-Edition

THE TRAGEDY OF SERENA’S SISTER

Yetunde Price’s beau breaks down recalling night she was killed

By SARA NATHAN and MARJORIE HERNANDEZ

ROLLAND Wormley never talks about the night his girlfriend, Yetunde Price, was murdered beside him. He never talks about how he desperately tried to save the older sister of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams, and was with her in her final moments following the drive-by shooting in Los Angeles.

He also never talks about the nightmare of being, as he claims, put in handcuffs and carted off to a cell, with police thinking he could be involved in Yetunde’s killing.

Memories of Yetunde, who was 31 and a mom of three when she was gunned down in September 2003, have haunted Wormley every day since her death. Now they are being refreshed by the new movie “King Richard,” about the Williams family — including Yetunde.

Wormley, 46, is breaking his silence in an exclusive interview.

“A lot of people haven’t heard my side of the story. This really messed me up,” he told The Post. “The truth is, the Williams family didn’t just sweep me under the rug, they flushed me down the toilet, as well.”

A representative for the Williams family did not comment.

For Wormley, Yetunde’s murder — which happened just yards from the Compton neighborhood courts where Venus and Serena learned to play tennis — left him spiraling into a life of crime and struggling with mental-health issues.

The two first met at a surprise party in Compton, hosted by mutual friends, to celebrate his 28th birthday on April 30, 2003.

“Tunde wasn’t dancing, so I left everyone on the dance floor and sat by her side. I didn’t know who she was — I didn’t know she was from the Williams family — but I just wanted to make sure everyone was happy,” Wormley recalled.

“We were inseparable. We talked and danced the whole night . . . We spent the whole night together.”

The couple began dating and got serious fast. Yetunde — a registered nurse, beauty-salon owner and part-time assistant to her famous sisters — asked Wormley to move into her Corona, Calif., home.

“I accumulated so much love for her kids,” Wormley said of Yetunde’s three children.

Still, he turned down Yetunde’s request to move in and get married.

“She was a single mom with three really young kids, and I was young,” Wormley said. “I told her, ‘I don't want to hurt you and be in the kids’ lives and end up breaking up.’ ”

Yetunde, a high-school valedictorian, was the oldest daughter of Oracene Price and Yusef Rasheed. She and her sisters, Lyndrea and Isha, were raised by Oracene and her new husband, Richard Williams, along with their halfsisters, Venus and Serena.

Yetunde had her son Jeffrey, who was 11 at the time of his mom’s death, with Jeffrey Johnson. She left him after he was jailed for assaulting a policeman.

She then wed Byron Bobbitt and had daughter Justus and son Jair — ages 5 and 3 at their mom’s passing. But she filed a police complaint in 1997 that read in part: “Husband threatened me with a knife to my throat, stating he would kill me if I took his daughter away — and he also physically assaulted me.”

With her family’s help, Yetunde divorced Bobbitt in 2000.

Wormley admits he was no angel. He had served time for vehicle theft, petty theft and domestic violence and was on parole for drug and gun offenses at the time of his girlfriend’s death.

He said he told Yetunde all about his past. “I was in a gang when I met her, but I would not show her any parts of that. It was a totally different life with me and her.”

THE night of Sept. 14, 2003, Yetunde had been “calling and calling” Wormley, upset that he had forgotten a planned date.

“I told her, ‘We still got tomorrow,’ ” Wormley recalled.

Yetunde picked him up before midnight from a friend’s house in West Compton.

“She told me she was drinking a little bit and asked me to take the wheel,” he said. But Wormley didn’t have a valid driver’s license, so he stuck to side streets as he drove Yetunde’s GMC Yukon Denali.

“It freaked me out, seeing her crying,” he told The Post. “I was desperately trying to make it up to her. Her last words to me were ‘Oh, Ro.’ ”

Their car was, he said, “right across the street from where her sisters practiced tennis, and I see these sparks. I couldn’t hear anything as the windows were up. I see a guy standing to the side of a house . . . He has something in his hand, and he’s shooting at us.

“I instantly grab Tunde’s hand and press the gas. I floor it and drive through the next set of lights.

I’m freaking out.”

As he explained to The Post what happened, Wormley began to sob.

“The back window is just shattered. I pull over. I lift Tunde up and blood is dripping out of her. I didn’t see where she got shot, and now I’m freaking out and it’s dark . . . It was a lot. It was a lot.”

In shock, Wormley drove to his mother’s nearby apartment, and she called 911. He claimed that the authorities who arrived arrested him on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department did not follow up for comment.

According to Wormley, Yetunde — who had been shot by an AK-47 assault rifle — was still in the passenger seat when cops cuffed him.

“They left her in the truck while she was still living,” he alleged. “If they would have took her to the hospital immediately, she would still be living.

“All I kept saying was to get her to hospital . . . They didn’t care about anybody [who was] black or coming to their rescue, especially when it was gun violence — until they found out that she was a superstar’s sister.”

LAPD officers reportedly held Wormley for allegedly violating the terms of his parole. During interrogations, he claims, authorities told him that other witnesses said he had fought with people at the Compton house, which he denied.

“I had my hands cuffed behind my back like an animal,” Wormley alleged.

“They wouldn’t let me phone a lawyer or my family. They told me they didn’t want to harm their investigation.”

Most painful, he said, was missing Yetunde’s funeral. Wormley said he was kept behind bars for just over a week

“I asked God every day, ‘Why did you take her? . . . Why didn't you take me?’ ” he recalled.

He claims that the Williams and Price families “shut me out.”

“I went through hell the minute I lost Tunde. Her family thought I had something to do with it,” Wormley said.

In January 2004, police arrested former Crips member Robert Maxfield, then 23, for the killing.

In 2006, Maxfield pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, the Los Angeles Times reported, and paroled in March 2018, according to state corrections officials. He has since been in and out of trouble with the law, according to Los Angeles County sheriff ’s officials and jail records.

Wormley spiraled. “He was just devastated by Tunde’s death. That just took his life away,” his sister Carmelle said. He went to jail in 2004 after pleading no contest to burglary. In December 2006, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison for robbery and attempted murder.

He’s now two years out of prison and on parole, working as an Amazon delivery driver. He has five children and a sixth on the way with a girlfriend.

On Facebook Watch’s “Red Table Talk” last month, Serena Williams said seeing Yetunde on screen, as portrayed by actress Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew, in “King Richard,” made her emotional.

“I think I cried the whole time,” she said.

The Williams family opened the Yetunde Price Resource Center in Compton in 2016 to provide resources and programming to those affected by trauma.

As for Wormley, who has a tattoo of Price’s name, he is concentrating on taking care of his kids and “staying out of trouble.” He still thinks often of Yetunde. “I’m not sure if I’ll be able to watch the film,” he said.

“All I did was get in the car and drive. I’m sorry I turned down the wrong street.”

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2021-12-05T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-05T08:00:00.0000000Z

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