A court heard this week that Emeli Sande’s rapper ex-boyfriend yelled three words before collapsing on the floor during a Jubilee weekend party and dying.
Laurie John-Phillip, 33, is suspected of killing rapper Hypo, real name Lamar Jackson, on June 3 of last year.
According to the Old Bailey, 400 to 500 people attended the ‘very busy’ party staged in a tent at Woodford Town Football Club in east London.
Jackson, 39, was ‘well known’ in Hackney, east London, according to the court.
He dated Sande for a year before splitting up in 2017.
The defendant, known as ‘Bigga,’ arrived at the party at 4 p.m. on June 2, last year, while Jackson came four hours later in a black Bentley driven by his buddy Obi Benson-Okpala.
CCTV revealed a confrontation between the defendant and Jackson at approximately 10.30 p.m., which also implicated the defendant’s cousin Kieron Ceasar, whose nickname is ‘Tiny,’ according to the court.
Jurors were told that as the lights came on at midnight and people began to depart, Benson-Okpala heard a lady yell out that someone had been stabbed.
According to the prosecution, as he glanced to his right, he noticed his friend Jackson collapsing slowly onto his back and onto the ground.
The trial heard that he joined the numerous people who raced to aid, dialling 999, and that at one point he went to retrieve his car to drive his buddy to the hospital because the ambulance was taking too long to arrive.
Witness Jurors were informed that Graeme McLean observed someone rush forward from behind Jackson and hit him on the upper left area of his chest before yelling, “I’ve been stabbed.”
According to the prosecution, a blood stain the size of a snooker ball developed on his clothing before he fell to the ground.
The purported incident, jurors were informed, was not captured on CCTV.
According to the hearing, the defendant departed the venue “as swiftly as he could.”
Ambulance services arrived at 12.22 a.m. on June 3, 2017, but Jackson had stopped breathing and was pronounced dead at 12.44 a.m.
According to the court, he was stabbed around 12:07 a.m.
His cause of death was determined by a post-mortem study to be sharp force trauma to the chest.
The defendant handed himself in to police and in three subsequent interviews spoke only to provide a prepared statement which said: ‘I did not murder Lamar Jackson’ and to give a description of himself.
The trial continues.