The woman who drove the man charged with the murder of Nipsey Hussle testified in court on Monday, saying she unknowingly became the getaway driver.
Per NBC Los Angeles, 35-year-old Bryannita Nicholson recalled the moment she saw Nipsey outside a South Los Angeles shopping center on March 31, 2019. Nicholson, who met accused murderer Eric Holder Jr. while driving for Lyft a just over a month earlier, recalled, “I said, ‘Ooh, there’s goes Nipsey, he fine.’” At the time, she mentioned to Holder that she wanted to take a picture with Nip.
The shopping center was home to Nip’s clothing store The Marathon, and the Master Burger restaurant where Holder asked Nicholson to take him. Holder got out of the car and walked toward the rapper as Nicholson looked for parking, and at no point did he mention to her that he knew Nip through connections to a street gang. By the time she joined Holder, she noticed his voice was raised. “Eric was asking Nipsey, ‘Did you tell somebody I snitched?’” she testified.
Nicholson said she was able to get a selfie with the rapper, then rushed to her car to post the picture. “I was just excited, I was just happy, I just wanted to show my Facebook friends,” she said. After this, Holder went into the burger restaurant and told Nicholson to drive around the block, at which point he pulled out a semi-automatic handgun and loaded it. “I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ You put that away, you ain’t going to shoot nothing outside my car,’” Nicholson continued. “He did put it away.”
She then pulled into an alley after Holder asked, and he said he would only be a few moments. Nicholson said she heard gunshots moments later, and saw a man running from the scene. She considered leaving, but decided against it in case Holder had been shot. He later appeared again and told her to drive. “I was like, ‘What happened?’” Nicholson testified. “He said, ‘You talk too much I ought to slap you.’ And he was just like, ‘Drive! Drive!'” It was only when she got home that she learned Nipsey was fatally shot.
In the comments on her selfie with Nipsey, some said Holder was a suspect.
“Did it start to occur to you at that moment that Eric might have done it?” asked Deputy District Attorney John McKinney in court, to which Nicholson answered, “Yes.” Despite this, she later agreed to pick him up, and did not explain why she did.