Bestinau got that-
Rapper Kidd Creole feared for his life when he fatally stabbed a homeless man in Midtown five years ago, his lawyer claimed Friday as the murder trial of the controversial hip-hop pioneer started.
The 61-year-old rapper, whose real name is Nathaniel Glover, is accused of stabbing hobo John Jolly, 55, after a verbal confrontation in Midtown in 2017 because he thought Jolly was beating him.
But attorney Scottie Celestin blamed Jolly’s death on a mix of alcohol and the sedative Versed, which he was given in the hospital for being combative with emergency personnel.
Celestin said Glover thought “the victim might harm him.”
“My client was in fear, he was in fear for his life,” Celestin said. “He had no intention of harming Mr. Jolly.”
Assistant District Attorney Mark Dahl said Glover made a “stunning and candid” confession when he spoke to police after Jolly passed away.
“I should have just kept going, should have just kept going,” Glover said, according to Dahl. “It’s all my fault. I chose to stab him. I have to take responsibility for that.”
When Glover was first taken into custody, he spoke to detectives and the assistant DA twice before asking if the victim had died, Dahl said. When Glover was told the victim was dead, he was if there was anything he wanted to tell the family, Dahl said.
“Tell them, ‘I didn’t mean to kill him,'” Glover replied, according to Dahl’s account.
Glover appeared in court in a dark suit, off-white shirt and cream team, his gray hair braided in a ponytail. He was wearing a mask and handcuffed when he first arrived, before saying “good morning” to the judge.
Once a member of the iconic group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, by the time of the fatal collision, Glover had become a simple maintenance worker living in a room in The Bronx.
He was on his way to work on August 1, 2017 when Jolly, a registered sex offender, reportedly yelled, “What’s up?” to the rapper as he passed the corner of East 44th Street and Third Avenue.
Glover told police he “suspected the man was gay,” the prosecutor said, but he couldn’t hear what Jolly was saying because he was wearing headphones. He pulled out the headphones and asked Jolly to repeat himself.
“Not a problem bro, nothing to worry about bro,” Glover replied, according to prosecutors.
Jolly followed Glover, who pulled a steak knife, which he held around his wrist with rubber bands, and stabbed the drunken homeless man in the chest. Glover was previously robbed in 2005, his lawyer said.
But the prosecutor said the only justification for the stabbing was because the victim said, “What is it?”
“Those are the words in the defendant’s mind that were so threatening and menacing that he had no choice but to defend himself with a deadly physical assault,” Dahl said.
Glover previously struggled with that characterization that he thought Jolly hit him with.
“Now I’m fighting the image they painted me as a person who is intolerant of people with alternative lifestyles and that’s not true,” he told The Source magazine in an interview from behind bars earlier this month.
“They made me look like I was the villain and the person who actually attacked me was the victim,” Glover said in the interview. “How do they justify accusing me of murder when this man attacked me?”
Prosecutors said Glover went to work after the stabbing, wiping blood from the knife with a tissue, which he flushed down a toilet. He returned to Mount Hope after being told there was no work and took another route home, prosecutors said.