A woman who dated Eric Holder, Jr., the man who is accused of fatally shooting Nipsey Hussle, testified on Monday, June 20th in a Los Angeles Superior Court.
Bryannita Nicholson said she saw the suspect load bullets into his gun before his altercation with the rapper in front of the Marathon store.
Nicholson said she and Holder, whom she was intimate with during this time, drove to get him some food and stopped in the shopping center where the late rapper was killed.
She said when they saw Nip, she remembers being excited to see him.
“I saw him as soon as I turned into the parking lot and I said, ‘Oh, there goes Nipsey! He’s fine! … Eric (Holder) was not wearing a shirt when he got out and he went to Nipsey,” she remembers saying, the NY Post reports.
But her guy was not as hyped. He jumped out of the car and asked Nipsey, “Did you say I snitched?”
Then he left the rapper and the two other men who were with him.
While on the stand, Senior Deputy District Attorney John McKinney asked her if she thought this was the beginning of a fight. She responded, “No, it didn’t occur to me at all.”
In fact, she took a picture with the “Victory Lap” rapper before returning to the car after her ex, Holder, picked up the food he wanted.
Holder then told Nicholson to spin the block, she said on the stand. When they returned to The Marathon store parking lot, she observed the defendant loading his gun.
She said, “Once we came around the block, that’s when I seen (sic) him put bullets into the automatic gun. It was the black one… When he was doing it, I said, ‘What are you doing?! You aren’t going to shoot that out my car!’ Then he put it away.”
Nicholson testified Holder then told her to turn onto Crenshaw Boulevard and park the car in an alleyway.
The woman said she watched Holder take two additional bites of his chili cheese fries before exiting the car, noting aside from him loading the gun, at no point did he seem upset as he walked down the alleyway.
She thought, “I just thought he was going to get a shirt or something.” But then she heard the gunshots… and out of concern she worried about her boyfriend.
Her concern from him shifted, after he returned with a black semi-automatic weapon and chrome revolver and told her to drive away from the alleyway.
The witness said he put the guns in a bag, and confessed, “I wasn’t even thinking that he would use it.”
Nicholson admitted though she was intimate with Holder, she was never his girl and considered him “a homeboy.”
They had only met about a month before the shooting.
She also said she didn’t connect Nipsey’s death with Holder until the next day, after seeing a news report about the rap star dying.
“I asked him about it again … he didn’t say too much and he went to the balcony, smoked marijuana, and he went to sleep. That was it,” Nicholson testified.
Nicholson will resume her testimony today (June 21st).
