L.A. Police Seek Harlem Boxer in Friend’s Slaying

When they first met more than 10 years ago, up the grimy stairs that led to the now-defunct Times Square boxing gym, they were the most unlikely of friends.Sam Kellerman had come from lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, with private-school friends who wore crests on their sport jackets and three brothers who playfully snapped jabs at each other. He wanted to be tough.James Butler was toughness itself, a street-bred amateur sensation with hard eyes, a chiseled torso, and a menacing overhand right that, among his family in public-housing complexes, earned him the nom de guerre “the Harlem Hammer.”In the gym, out of the gym, they clicked.“Sam and James, they were close, we were all close,” said their trainer, Alexander Newbold. Tearing up with confusion and anger yesterday, Mr. Newbold, who in boxing circles is known simply as “Ness,” said: “We were family, man. We were brothers, man.”That intimate fraternity was shattered in a most unlikely way Sunday night when Los Angeles police entered Sam Kellerman’s rented Hollywood apartment and found him lying dead on the floor. There appeared to be bruises on the 29-year-old’s body and his head, Los Angeles police said. An autopsy conducted yesterday showed the cause of death to be “blunt force head trauma,” the Los Angeles County coroner’s office reported, and Hollywood detectives are looking to question Mr. Butler as a suspect in Kellerman’s murder.Butler, 31, a light heavyweight with a history of having a violent temper, is missing.In late September, the fighter flew to Hollywood to move in with Kellerman after his old friend offered him free room and board, according to Mr. Butler’s boxing manager, David Berlin.Now, Hollywood detectives are seeking Butler for questioning in connection with his friend’s death. They said he may be on the lam and driving Kellerman’s car, a 1993 Cadillac Seville.Members of the Kellerman family could not be reached yesterday. A funeral service is scheduled for Sunday morning at Riverside Memorial Chapel, at Amsterdam Avenue and West 76th Street.“Unbelievable, so unbelievable,” Mr. Newbold said.The trainer still remembers the day Sam Kellerman, then a skinny, cocksure 17, first walked into the gym.“He was in baggy sweatpants, T-shirt, and his hat backwards,” Mr. Newbold remembered. “He told me, ‘I want to be a fighter,’ and I told him, ‘Yeah right, kid, You ain’t no fighter.’ He said, ‘No, I’m gonna be a fighter. You”ll see.'”After his early days at the gym, Kellerman gave up his ring aspirations, looking instead to pursue a career in acting and writing. He also wanted to follow in the footsteps of older brother Max Kellerman, 31, an energetic boxing commentator for ESPN for six years and now anchor of his own television show, “I, Max,” on the Fox Sports Network.Mr. Butler’s path was bumpier.When he was tortured with jabs and thoroughly humiliated in a November 2001 match against Richard Grant, he fired a sucker punch at his opponent after the final bell. Both men had taken off their gloves, and the victor offered to shake hands. The punch fractured Mr. Grant’s jaw and dropped him temporarily into a coma.“It was the only right hand he landed all night,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who was chairman of the State Athletic Commission, said of Mr. Butler.“The punch was so unfair, so egregious, so criminal, it’s hard not to have anything but contempt for the guy,” Mr. Kelly said.Mr. Butler was handcuffed in his trunks in his dressing room and charged with assault. He spent four months in jail on Riker’s Island.Later, he mounted an ill-fated comeback, moving from televised performances and $10,000 purses to $1,000 purses for questionable performances. He traveled to Bronx roller-skating rinks to face palookas, to far-off places like the Farm Bureau Building in Indianapolis to face crafty “tomato cans” like Reggie Strickland, a Midwesterner holding the record for career losses at 268 and counting – compared to 65 wins and 17 draws.“James was only going through the motions, for the payday,” Mr. Berlin said. “James was in the ring, physically speaking. Mentally, he wasn’t really there.”Sam Kellerman, as he had done so many times before, tried to help, tried to give him direction, tried to boost James Butler’s confidence, giving him a set of house keys, according to Mr. Newbold.“Sam had this heart, he wanted nothing, he would give you his last,” Mr. Newbold said.

L.A. Police Seek Harlem Boxer in Friend’s Slaying

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