Three years after his startling public shooting death outside of his South Los Angeles apparel store, Grammy-winning rapper, visionary businessman, and hometown hero Nipsey Hussle’s confessed killer was found guilty of first-degree murder on Wednesday.
In a midday ambush at a strip mall parking lot on March 31, 2019, Eric Ronald Holder Jr. shot the adored musician with a black semiautomatic in one hand and a silver revolver in the other, according to a jury of nine women and three men. Holder Jr. was also found guilty of possessing a fire arm and two counts of attempted voluntary manslaughter.
Holder was alone in the courtroom when he learned his fate, save for his public defence team, unlike the thousands of fans and members of the music industry elite who flocked to the Staples Center for Hussle’s public memorial and surrounded his hearse during its 25-mile procession through South Los Angeles.
Deputy District Attorney John McKinney emphasised the heartbreaking loss that Hussle’s immediate family opted not to attend during his closing argument last week. Hussle was described by the prosecution as “a favourite son” of South Los Angeles who overcame the dangers of gang life and “pockets of concentrated poverty” that plagued his Hyde Park neighbourhood to become a renowned recording artist, budding entrepreneur, and well-known philanthropist.
“The streets he used to run as a young man became the life material that he used to become a voice of those same streets. While some people get successful, they make money, they leave their neighborhood, they change their address, this man was different. He wanted to change the neighborhood. He invested in the neighborhood. He kept the same friends and the neighborhood loved him. They called him Neighborhood Nip,” McKinney said.
