In yet another heart-wrenching twist to an already tragic story, Nipsey Hussle reportedly shook hands with his alleged killer just moments before he was gunned down, according to an eye-witness who narrowly missed being a victim himself.
Herman Douglas, who told the Los Angeles Times he was one of Hussle’s business partners, claims he was one of the last people to see the rapper alive outside his Marathon Clothing store in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles. He told the Times that Nipsey shook hands with the man who’s being accused of killing him, just moments before the shooting took place.
“Me and Nipsey was talking, and the dude that shot him (Eric Holder), he came and shook our hands. Said he was a rapper and this old bulls—-,” Douglas told the Times. “Shook our hands, the dude went and got his burger. He left.”
Douglas said he casually walked back inside the clothing store with his own food — right at the moment bullets began flying.
“So, I might have left Nipsey’s side maybe three seconds,” Douglas recalled. “I left him maybe, approximately three seconds that I had left Nipsey and the dude came and shot him.”
Two other people who were with Nipsey at the time of the shooting — an unidentified former prisoner and his nephew — were injured in the shooting. “Nip,” as Hussle is often called, had ventured up to the store Sunday without security to help this friend get some new clothes before he was going to see his family as a free man for the first time in 20 years.
The Los Angeles Police Department told the Times that Holder, an aspiring rapper, shot Hussle over an unknown personal beef.
Douglas refutes that claim. He said Holder was jealous of the Nipsey’s success.
“What seems to be a less talented rapper had envy and hate in his eyes,” said Douglas. “It was nothing else. It was no motive. It was no beef.”
