NEW YORK — Hip-hop icon Kidd Creole was convicted of manslaughter for stabbing a homeless man to death in 2017, despite the music legend’s self-defense claims.
Nathaniel Glover, 61, a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, was found guilty of manslaughter after a Manhattan Supreme Court jury deliberated for about three hours Wednesday. He was acquitted of second-degree murder.
He could face up to 25 years in prison when he’s sentenced May 4; he’s already spent nearly five years on Rikers Island awaiting trial.
Prosecutors said Glover stabbed John Jolly because he thought the homeless man was hitting on him.
Glover was walking to work on Aug. 1, 2017, with a steak knife hidden up his sleeve when Jolly approached him at East 44th Street and Third Avenue and asked, “What’s up?” — which left Glover “annoyed” because he interpreted it as a sexual come-on, Assistant District Attorney Mark Dahl said.
Glover has long maintained he acted in self-defense, with his lawyer Scottie Celestin contending no one who approaches a stranger with the question of “What’s up?” late at night has good intentions.
He also argued Jolly didn’t die of his stab wounds, but instead from a dose of a potent benzodiazepine from medics at Bellevue Hospital, which can be lethal if given to a drunk person.
Jolly took a final swig of his beer before collapsing.
Dahl countered that Jolly posed no real threat and that Glover unnecessarily escalated the interaction when he could have just kept on walking.
Glover walked past Jolly, but turned around, met him chest to chest and stabbed him twice, prosecutors said.
Dahl argued that Glover washed off the knife as soon as he arrived to work and changed his outfit. When his boss sent him home early, Dahl said, Glover took a different route than normal.
Glover turned down an offer to plead guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a 10-year sentence two weeks before opening arguments.
Celestin declined to comment Wednesday night.
“Nathaniel Glover committed a shocking act of violence,” Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg said in a statement Monday night. “This conviction makes clear my Office will hold people who commit violent crime accountable to the full extent of the law.”
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, which started in the South Bronx in the 1970s, was the first hip-hop group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Kidd Creole was credited as a composer and writer on several of the group’s hits.
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