Kidd Creole ‘had no intention of harming a homeless man he stabbed: attorney

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 began.

The 61-year-old rapper, whose real name is Nathaniel Glover, is accused of stabbing tramp John Jolly, 55, after a verbal altercation in Midtown in 2017 because he thought Jolly was hitting on him.

But attorney Scottie Celestin blamed Jolly’s death on a mixture of alcohol and the sedative Versed, which he was given at the hospital for being combative with emergency responders.

Celestin said Glover thought “the victim might harm him.”

“My client was scared, he was scared 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 speaking to police after Jolly’s death.

“I should have just carried on, should have just carried on,” 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 district attorney before asking if the victim had died, Dahl said. When Glover was told the victim was dead, if he had anything to say to the family, it was him, Dahl said.

“Tell them, ‘I didn’t mean to kill him,'” Glover replied, according to Dahl’s report.

Glover appeared in court wearing a dark suit, cream shirt and team shirt, his gray hair braided into a ponytail. He wore a mask and was handcuffed upon arrival before saying “good morning” to the judge.

Once a member of the legendary group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, by the time of the fatal clash, Glover had become a reclusive maintenance worker living in a Bronx dorm.

He was on his way to work on Aug. 1, 2017, when Jolly, a registered sex offender, allegedly yelled, “What’s up?” at the rapper as he passed the corner of East 44th Street and Third Avenue.

Glover told prosecutors he “suspects the man is gay,” but he couldn’t hear what Jolly was saying because he was wearing headphones. He took out the headphones and asked Jolly to repeat herself.

“Nothing going on bro, nothing going on bro,” Glover replied, according to prosecutors.

Jolly followed Glover, who pulled out a steak knife he strapped to his wrist with rubber bands and stabbed the drunk homeless man in the chest. Glover was robbed in 2005, his attorney said.

But the prosecutor said the only justification for the stabbing was that the victim said, “What’s wrong?”

“Those are the words in the defendant’s mind that were so ominous and menacing that he had no choice but to use deadly physical force to defend himself,” Dahl said.

Glover has previously grappled with this characterization, which he thought Jolly would meet.

“Now I’m fighting the image that they portrayed me as a person who is intolerant of people with alternative lifestyles, and that’s not true,” he said in an behind-the-bars interview with The Source magazine earlier this month. .

“They made me seem like I was the villain and the person who actually attacked me, the victim,” Glover said in the interview. “How do you justify charging me with murder when this guy attacked me?”

Prosecutors said Glover went to work after the stab and used a handkerchief to wipe blood off the blade, which he flushed down a toilet. He returned to Mount Hope after being told there was no work and took a different route home, prosecutors said.