On Tuesday, the sixth day of Tory Lanez’s felony assault trial, Sean Kelly, the Los Angeles resident who witnessed the shooting of Megan Thee Stallion, said: “He was firing everywhere.”
Kelly—who called 911 during the dispute—testified that he watched the violent altercation that involved Lanez; Megan; her former assistant and friend, Kelsey Harris; and Lanez’s driver, from his window on July 12, 2020. His account was at times difficult to follow, as Kelly—who was called as a defense witness— repeatedly claimed he never actually saw a firearm, yet testified that he witnessed “flashes” that he described coming from “the girl” (Harris) and “the smaller gentleman” (Lanez).
“I want to be clear, I never saw a gun, OK, I just saw flashes,” he told the court.
“Whose hand did you see the flashes from first?” George Mgdesyan, Lanez’s attorney, prompted.
“The girl,” Kelly replied. “But they were all together, they were very close together.”
Just prior to the shooting, Kelly said he woke up and saw four people fighting and shouting at each other on the residential road around 4 a.m. Kelly recalled moving to his balcony to continue watching the escalating dispute, noting that he first saw two women “pulling hair and hitting each other.”
“It was quite violent,” Kelly said. He then described seeing “the taller guy” (Lanez’s driver) get out of the vehicle and attempt to intervene. At the same time of the first flash, Lanez also got out of the vehicle.
“Then I heard what I though was fireworks...I saw a muzzle flash about the same time the smaller gentleman (Lanez) got out of the car,” Kelly recalled. Where was the first flash? “Near the girls.” Though Kelly never saw the gun, he said he believed the first flash came from Harris, noted how close in proximity the group was to one another and that Lanez was “shouting.” The subsequent “flashes” he definitively attributed to Lanez: “I just saw he was very angry, shouting, and he, then, the flashes then came from him.” In his 911 call the night of, Kelly didn’t mention seeing a woman firing the gun.
During cross-examination, prosecutors seized on Kelly’s repeated testimony that Lanez had fired the shots.
In response to the prosecutor’s question, Kelly told the court that an “agitated” Lanez got out of the vehicle with his arms outstretched. “He was firing everywhere.” He said he saw four or five shots come from near Lanez’s hands.
Following the series of shots, Kelly recalled seeing a “bleeding” woman (presumably Megan) who was “kicking all the time” on the ground. “She was crawling along, crawling, stumbling.” Meanwhile, the “shorter guy” aimed a “torrent of abuse” at her. “It was all N-words, and F this, F that,” Kelly said. The expletives, he said, weren’t exclusively directed at the woman, though; he was just generally “highly agitated” and “shouting” at everyone.
At one point, Kelly said he saw the woman “curled up on the ground in the fetal position” in a nearby driveway, and Harris and Lanez’s driver looked to be beating her: “It appeared to me that they were trying to kill her.” Soon thereafter, they “put her in the car and took off.”
A later witness, Lead Detective Ryan Stogner, told the court that in an interview after the shooting, Kelly said he “couldn’t tell” who was holding the firearm. In her own interview, he said that Megan immediately identified the shooter as “her friend Tory Lanez.” Consistent with prior testimony, Stogner said Megan expressed fear regarding police brutality and had also mentioned Lanez offering money not to speak of the shooting.
“She was very calm, somber and I would say upset about the entire situation,” Stogner told the court.
Lanez (identified in court by his birth name, Daystar Peterson) has pleaded not guilty to all charges, which include one count each of assault with a semiautomatic firearm, discharging a firearm with gross negligence, and carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle.