Rapper Kidd Creole feared for his life when he fatally stabbed a homeless man in Midtown five years ago, his attorney claimed Friday as the embattled hip-hop pioneer’s murder trial got underway.
The 61-year-old rapper, whose real name is Nathaniel Glover, is accused of stabbing vagrant John Jolly, 55, after a verbal confrontation in Midtown in 2017 because he thought Jolly was hitting on him.
But attorney Scottie Celestin blamed Jolly’s death on a mix of alcohol and the sedative Versed, which was given to him at the hospital because he was being combative with emergency workers.
Celestin said Glover thought “the victim might harm him.”
“My client was in fear, he was in fear for his life,” Celestin said. “He didn’t intend to harm Mr. Jolly.”
Assistant district attorney Mark Dahl said Glover made a “stunning and candid” confession when he spoke to police after Jolly had died.
“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 twice to detectives and the assistant DA 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, said Dahl.
“Tell them, ‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’” Glover responded, according to Dahl’s account.
Glover appeared in court wearing dark suit, off-white shirt and cream team, his grayed hair braided in a ponytail. He wore a mask and was cuffed when he first arrived, before saying “good morning” to the judge.
Once a member of the iconic group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Glover had become a low-key maintenance worker living in a rooming house in The Bronx by the time of the deadly clash.
He was on his way to work on Aug. 1, 2017 when Jolly, a registered sex offender, allegedly called out, “What’s up?” to the rapper as he passed the corner of East 44th Street and Third Avenue.
Glover told cops he “suspected the man was gay,” according to the prosecution, but he couldn’t hear what Jolly said because he was wearing earphones. He took out the earphones and asked Jolly to repeat himself.
“Nothing up bro, nothing up bro,” Glover replied, according to prosecutors.
Jolly followed Glover, who pulled a steak knife he kept tied to his wrist with rubber bands and stabbed the drunk homeless man in the chest. Glover had been robbed before in 2005, his attorney said.
But the prosecutor said the only justification for stabbing jolly was because the victim said, “What’s up?”
“Those are the words in the defendant’s mind that was so threatening and menacing that he had no choice but to defend himself with a deadly physical force,” Dahl said.
Glover has previously taken issue with that characterization he thought Jolly was hitting on him.
“Now I’m fighting the image that they portrayed me as a person who’s 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 seem like I was the villain and the person who actually attacked me was the victim,” Glover said in the interview. “How do they justify charging me with murder when this guy attacked me?”
Prosecutors said Glover went to work after the stabbing and wiped blood from the blade with a tissue, which he flushed down a toilet. He returned home to Mount Hope after being told there was no work and took a different route home, prosecutors said.
