Kerry Lathan, one of the two men shot alongside slain rapper Nipsey Hussle, is opening up about his final conversation with the rapper.
Speaking with Los Angeles’ KCAL 9, Lathan remembered Hussle as giving, saying the rapper had told him to come to the store to pick up some clothes.
“He told me that he would have the shirt that I needed next week and I said OK. And as I turned it was all bad,” he recalled.
Lathan, who is still recovering from the shooting which left him with a bullet in his back, offered poignant words about Hussle to HuffPost, defending the rapper’s past as a gang member and calling attention to his transformations into a community hero.
“If you say a person has made a change, or a metamorphosis, you can’t take an inchworm, then turn it into a butterfly, and put him back into an inchworm. That’s what Nipsey did,” Lathan said. “He transformed around there and tried to make money off his rap albums to help the community, to give back when there was no one giving back. So how can you put a halo and then put horns?”
Hussle, whose birth name is Ermias Joseph Asghedom, was gunned down in March 31 in front of his store The Marathon Clothing in Los Angeles
FFriends and family, including partner Lauren London, and even former president Barack Obama remembered Hussle during a moving memorial at L.A.’s Staples Center earlier this month.
London called the rapper a “majestic” soul, who made her feel “protected.”
“We will never be the same,” she said during the memorial. “He’s in all of us.”
