The jealous mistress who murdered former NFL star Steve McNair before killing herself sent him a barrage of distressed text messages in the days before the July 4 bloodbath in Nashville, police revealed yesterday.
“Baby, I might have a breakdown I’m so stressed,” Sahel Kazemi wrote McNair in messages filled with misspellings the morning before she killed him.
“Baby, I might go to the hospital. Baby, whats wrong w me I can hardly breath . . . I just want this pain in my chest to go away.”
Kazemi was already deeply in debt and craving attention from the married former Tennessee Titan quarterback. She became completely unraveled after discovering he was not only cheating on his wife — but on her, with a stunning Nashville woman.
The crazed Kazemi began stalking Leah Ignagni — and telling friends her life might as well be over.
“My life is just s- – – and I should end it!” Kazemi told a co-worker the day before she died.
Kazemi’s love rival was not oblivious to the tail.
“[Ignagni] recalled a day, two to three weeks before McNair’s murder, when she was leaving McNair’s . . . condo and observed a female inside a black Cadillac Escalade parked outside the building,” a police report said.
“Ignagni said she noticed the Escalade follow her . . . Ignagni said she noticed the same vehicle on several other occasions.”
Ignagni, who works as a casting director, claims she and McNair didn’t have a romantic relationship, Nashville TV station WSMV reported on its Web site last night, adding her friends say she’s anxious and embarrassed about the reports.
By July 3, the day before the murder, Kazemi, 20, and McNair, 36, began to exchange a flurry of text messages.
The conversations track the last, desperate hours of their relationship — and shows her efforts to lure him to the love nest that became a murder scene.
Urging him to come see her, she texted him the night before the slaying to say, “baby I have to be w u 2nite, I dnt care where . . . Tell me u gona be w me.”
McNair replied that he couldn’t get away because he couldn’t get his kids to sleep — although friends and a cabdriver later told cops he was really partying at two nightspots.
At 12:38 a.m. on July 4, he texted Kazemi to say he was headed to his rented condo, where she was waiting for him.
Cops said he was asleep on a sofa there when Kazemi fired four shots into him with a handgun she’d bought the night before.
She then sat next to him, fired a single shot into her head and slumped into her dead lover’s lap.
Kazemi had also been texting and phoning the man from whom she bought the gun, the Tennessean newspaper reported. The exchanges went on for weeks; she bought a gun from Adrian Gilliam Jr. on July 3, the paper said.
Kazemi had met the retired gridiron star — nicknamed “Air McNair” for his powerful throwing arm — six months earlier in a Nashville Dave & Buster’s restaurant where she was a waitress.
With Post Wire Services