PROVIDENCE — The owner of Pulse, a South Providence nightclub where a man was fatally shot and two others were wounded early Christmas morning, will not try to reopen the club.

Owner Alex Tomasso “just decided it was time to end that business,” his lawyer, Joseph A. Keough Jr., said yesterday.

The homicide “was something that was quite a blow to the ownership, to the staff, everybody who works there,” Keough said.

Pulse, which had been in business for eight years and had been the scene of previous gunplay, has been closed since the Christmas shootings. Two days after the incident the city Board of Licenses suspended the club’s operating licenses for the sake of public safety, pending a hearing in which Tomasso would have had an opportunity to contest the suspensions.

That hearing was scheduled for yesterday, but Keough came to the board meeting at City Hall and announced that Tomasso would surrender his licenses permanently.

The announcement was welcomed by the Police Department and the family of Kendall D. Marshall, 29, of Providence, who was pronounced dead at the hospital after being shot near the dance floor and a pool table on hip-hop night at Pulse.

Andrew J. Annaldo, license board chairman, said a decision by the holder of a liquor license to give up without a fight is unusual. He speculated that Tomasso concluded that an attempt to salvage his licenses would be unwinnable because of the seriousness of what occurred.

Tomasso owns and has owned a number of bars, nightclubs and restaurants in the Providence metropolitan area, some of which have been the target of punitive action by municipal licensing authorities. Among them is the former Sanctuary, an Olneyville nightclub that also had a history of violence.

A Sanctuary patron who was in a car in Sanctuary’s parking lot was shot dead in September 2003. Just over two months later, two men were wounded in what the police called a shoot- out in the parking lot behind the club. The police attributed other acts of violence to Sanctuary, including a stabbing inside.

The license board ultimately suspended Sanctuary’s licenses but allowed Tomasso to transfer his liquor license to another corporate entity, controlled by a different person who then opened a club called Giza at the same location, in a mill complex at 95 Hartford Ave.

Giza was closed by the city after yet another shooting in the parking lot, in July, in which a man was severely wounded in the head.

As for Pulse, Marshall had gone there for only the second time on Christmas Eve night, according to one of his sisters, Patrice Martin, to celebrate the holiday with his brothers. The shooting occurred at about 1:30 a.m. on Christmas.

Both the police and the family wanted the club closed permanently, and the police were pushing for that outcome.

Police Maj. Paul Fitzgerald, who said the department is satisfied with the permanent closing, said the investigation of the crime is continuing and there is nothing new to disclose.

Marshall’s step-mother, Norine Vaughn, pronounced the decision “excellent.” “If they didn’t [surrender], I was going to get up and say my piece” at the hearing, she said.

Martin said the family has been praying for Pulse’s permanent closing as well as a way to provide financially for Marshall’s two young children.

“One prayer has come through,” she said. “I’m so happy and overwhelmed. My heart’s pounding right now.”

Marshall, who had worked as a barber and in automotive repair jobs but was unemployed at the time of his death, is survived by his girlfriend, Annette Alves, their children, Dante, 6, and Anetra, 1, and a large extended family.

Marshall has a criminal record, but one of his brothers, Kyle Marshall, has insisted that Kendall Marshall had not been involved in any behavior that led to him being attacked. Family members have speculated that Kendall Marshall was not the target of the assailant and was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Investigators have been tightlipped about the incident, refusing to even identify the gender of the person who shot Marshall and wounded a Boston man and a man from Groton, Conn. Marshall family members have said that Kendall Marshall did not know the other two men.

Kendall Marshall’s criminal record as an adult dates to February 1996, when he pleaded no contest in Superior Court to two charges of drug-peddling and a charge of resisting arrest. Under Rhode Island law, a no-contest plea is the equivalent of guilty. Later that year he pleaded no contest in Superior Court to possession of a stolen motor vehicle.

In 1997 he pleaded no contest in Superior Court to another drug sales charge as well as resisting arrest. And in 2000 he pleaded no contest in Superior Court to a charge of creating and selling a counterfeit substance, which in street parlance is a “beat bag.” The idea of a beat bag is to sell someone an innocuous substance by claiming it is an illicit drug, thereby beating the buyer out of his money.

Marshall in 2001 pleaded no contest in Superior Court to marijuana possession. A District Court judge in 2002 found him guilty of driving with an expired license.

As a result of his convictions, Marshall paid a variety of fines and assessments and was ordered to undergo counseling, and in one case he was sentenced to 100 hours of community service. All told, according to Tracey Poole, spokeswoman at the Adult Correctional Institutions, Marshall was imprisoned at the ACI for two years and one month in various stints.