Nicki Minaj‘s father has reportedly been killed in a hit-and-run in Long Island.
Nassau County Police in New York confirmed the death of 64-year-old Robert Maraj to TMZ on Sunday.
Maraj was walking on a road in Mineola at about 6pm Friday when he was struck by a car heading northbound on Roslyn Road at the intersection with Raff Avenue, authorities said.
The driver fled the scene and has yet to be identified. Investigators have asked for the public’s help in tracking them down after the vehicle feld the scene too quickly for witnesses to get a description.
Maraj was rushed to a hospital, where he died.
Minaj, 38, has yet to comment publicly on her father’s death but a representative for the rapper confirmed his death.
The tragic news comes four months after the Super Bass rapper welcomed her first child with husband Kenneth Petty.
Minaj, born Onika Tanya Maraj in Trinidad and raised in New York City, has spoken about her relationship with her father on multiple occasions, often posting photos of the pair sharing loving embraces on social media.
Her parents both moved to the United States from Trinidad when she was five years old and raised Minaj in Jamaica, Queens.
She has detailed the domestic violence in her childhood home – including an incident in which he tried to burn down their house – and how her father would use crack cocaine.
In a 2015 interview with the New York Times, Minaj said they she was never personally abused by her father.
‘No. He was just abusive,’ she said. ‘I would always hear him yelling and cursing, always. And it made me feel it was the way to interact, because that’s how I saw him interacting.’
In 2010 she told Details magazine about how Maraj was allegedly abusive toward her mother, his wife Carol.
‘He drank a lot and did drugs, and he would get violent when he did. When he set fire to the house, he was attempting to kill my mother,’ she said at the time.
‘She got out before it burned all the way down. I’ve always had this female-empowerment thing in the back of my mind — because I wanted my mother to be stronger, and she couldn’t be. I thought: “If I’m successful, I can change her life.”‘
It’s unclear what terms Minaj was on with her father at the time of his death.
The family had already had a tough year, after Minaj’s brother Jelani Maraj was sentenced to life in prison in January 2020 for raping an 11-year-old child.
Jelani, 41, was found guilty of ‘predatory sexual assault against a child and endangering the welfare of a child’ in 2017 and last year, Nassau County Supreme Court Judge Robert McDonald refused to give him a soft sentence.
It was despite his lawyer reading a 2016 letter his famous sister wrote in a bid to reduce his time behind bars, calling him the ‘most patient, gentle, genuine, giving selfless man I know’.
The judge said that his ‘view is that you ruined this child’.
SOURCE: Daily Mail, Megan Sheets
BCNN1 WP 