Nicki Minaj discussed the last time she spoke to her late father Robert Maraj in an interview with Apple Music on Thursday (January 4). Minaj said she talked to him hours before he was killed in a hit-and-run crash in 2021.
“One day, I was rocking the baby in the rocking chair in his room, and I do not normally even have the phone on me when I’m rocking him,” Minaj recalled. “Because at that time, I was mad strict … But anyway, that day, as I’m rocking him, the phone rings. I look down, I see it’s my father. I normally would not have picked up. I promise you. I would’ve said, ‘OK,’ because I don’t like to be on the phone with the baby there … But something said pick up the phone.”
She continued, “I picked up. He was very happy. He was like, ‘Baby, I can come on Monday.’ Because he had been waiting to come to Cali to help me. And I kept saying, ‘Come on out.’”
Minaj mentioned how excited she was to have her father visit and spend time with her son. But the Hip-Hop star’s dad never got to make the trip. Minaj received a devastating call from her mother later that night.
“That was Friday,” she told Apple Music’s Ebro Darden. “He said he wanted to come on Monday. And we were so happy. I was like, ‘Yes! We’re gonna get help.’ And then we went to bed and sometime late while we were all asleep, the phone rang. It was my mother telling me that my father was in an accident and that she didn’t know what was gonna happen and she would call me back. And then everything started spinning, like literally.”
A driver named Charles Polevich struck Maraj, who was on foot, in Mineola, New York in February 2021. Polevich stopped his vehicle and got out to look at Maraj before fleeing the scene. Maraj was hospitalized in critical condition.
Maraj succumbed to his injuries a day later. Polevich pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident without reporting it and tampering with physical evidence. A judge sentenced him to a year in jail in 2022.
