NEW YORK — Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s Kidd Creole received a 16-year prison sentence Wednesday for fatally stabbing a homeless ex-con who approached him at random on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk.
A Manhattan Supreme Court jury in April found the Bronx-born artist, whose real name is Nathaniel Glover, guilty of manslaughter for John Jolly’s Aug. 1, 2017, killing. Glover was acquitted of second-degree murder.
Glover, 62, waited at Rikers Island almost five years to go to trial, and rejected a deal from prosecutors in March to plead to manslaughter in exchange for a 10-year sentence.
Glover and Jolly encountered one another on East 44th Street and Third Avenue as Glover made his way to an overnight shift at a midtown print shop.
Glover stabbed Jolly, 55, once in the chest with a steak knife hidden up his sleeve within moments of the homeless man asking him, “What’s up?” jurors heard at the trial.
Tourists discovered Jolly, unconscious, bleeding on the street. Glover continued to his job, changed his clothes, and disposed of the knife in a sewer.
Glover maintained he acted in self-defense. His lawyer Scottie Celestin, who defended the case pro bono, argued that Glover’s fear of an inquisitive stranger approaching him late at night was reasonable and that a white woman in his same position would have been sympathized with and not prosecuted.
Celestin also tried to convince jurors of the theory that the stab wound didn’t kill Jolly but rather a dose of potent benzodiazepine given to him by medics at Bellevue. The defense’s medical expert testified that it could prove lethal to someone who has been drinking, which Jolly had been.
Jolly’s friends in 2017 described him to the New York Daily News as a peaceful man who suffered from mental health problems.
“Mr. Jolly’s death was devastating to his family and those who knew him,” District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement.
“Every life we lose to violent crime ripples throughout our entire city, and we will continue to ensure everyone in our borough can live their lives with the sense of safety and security they deserve.”
Celestin did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday’s sentencing.
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