Rapper ASAP Rocky found not guilty of firing gun at former friend in Los Angeles

US RAPPER ASAP Rocky has been found not guilty of firing a handgun at a former friend on a Hollywood street in 2021.

“Thank y’all for saving my life,” he told jurors as they left the Los Angeles courtroom. They cleared him of two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm.

After the verdict was read, the 36-year-old hip-hop artist – whose legal name is Rakim Mayers – dove into the courtroom gallery to hug his long-time partner, Rihanna.

He risked a sentence of 24 years in prison if he had been convicted.

On the eve of trial, he turned down a prosecution offer of just six months in jail, along with probation and other conditions, if he would plead guilty to one count.

Insisting on his innocence, Rocky decided to gamble that a jury would feel the same. It paid off. The jurors felt at least that there was reasonable doubt of his guilt.

When the verdict was read, Rihanna cried and hugged the defence lawyers. She attended the trial sporadically and brought the couple’s two sons – two-year-old RZA Athelston Mayers and one-year-old Riot Rose Mayers – for some of the closing arguments.

During the weeks-long trial, prosecutors said Rocky had shot a nine-millimeter semi-automatic weapon during a confrontation with ASAP Relli, whose legal name is Terell Ephron, on 6 November 2021, in the heart of Hollywood, grazing his hand.

Rocky had insisted he had been carrying only a harmless prop gun.

The two had previously been friends, and had both been part of A$AP, a rap collective from New York, but had fallen out because other members of the group felt Rocky’s commercial success had made him arrogant.

Ephron told the jury he had been lured to a parking garage for an encounter that was partially caught on grainy surveillance video.

Rihanna arriving at court for the trial of her partner ASAP Rocky on Tuesday. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

He claimed that after the two exchanged words, Rocky pulled a gun from his waistband, put it toward Relli’s stomach and said, “I’ll kill you right now.”

Relli said two bullets were fired, with one of them grazing his knuckles.

Prop gun

Rocky’s lawyers and witnesses they called said Rocky had shot a prop gun that only fires blanks, which he had been carrying for security since taking it from a music video set months earlier. They said he fired it as a warning because Relli was attacking another member of their crew.

Defending attorney Joe Tacopina said the weapon was “absolutely nothing more than a prop gun… a starter gun, a blank gun, a fake gun. It’s used in pop movies and music videos.”

In his closing argument, he described Relli as “an angry pathological liar” and a “criminal” who “committed perjury again and again and again and again””.

ASAP Relli testifying during the trial. PA PA

He said seven police officers searched the scene of the shooting hours later but found neither shell casings nor a weapon.

Yet, after officers left, Relli returned to the scene and discovered a pair of nine-millimeter shell casings he said he had picked up from the street where he was shot at, Tacopina said.

Neither side was able to produce the gun they said had been used on the night.

The jurors were told that despite three years passing since the incident, no one mentioned the phony gun to authorities until the day jury selection began at the trial.

They were also instructed that if they found that Rocky reasonably believed that he or one of the two friends with him that night were in imminent danger of injury, and that he used reasonable force, they could find the defendant not guilty.

It was not immediately clear whether they reached the verdict because they believed he was in fact carrying a prop gun or that he acted in self-defence.

ASAP Rocky hugging attorney Joe Tacopina after he was found not guilty.

They did not have to agree on their reasoning, or explain it outside of the jury room. They just had to reach the same conclusion.

Rocky opted not to testify in his own defence.

In his closing argument, deputy district attorney John Lewin urged the jurors not to be influenced by the celebrity or family aspects of the case, and suggested Rihanna bringing the kids to closing arguments was an attempt to manipulate the jury.

“You are not allowed to consider how this might affect Rihanna and his kids,” the prosecutor said. “We are all responsible for our own actions in the world.”

‘Extortion’

Tacopina said the whole story of a shooting had been manufactured to extort money from his wealthy and successful client.

Speaking after the verdict, Tacopina told reporters the jury had seen through the “mirage of a case.”

“I’ve always said this was an extortion. The extortion played out live in court,” he said.

“The district attorney should look long and hard at prosecuting Terell Ephron.”

Tacopina paid tribute to Rocky and Rihanna, whom he described as “the greatest people.”

There was no immediate reaction from either Rocky or Rihanna, who had been in court frequently during the trial.

With reporting from Press Association