MIAMI (Court TV) — A Florida rapper asked a judge to dismiss the charges against her, taking the stand on Thursday to testify about the shooting that took a man’s life.
Kevhani Hicks stands in court on Nov. 5, 2026. (Court TV)
“I felt like I was out of time, and I just grabbed my gun as a last resort,” Kevhani Hicks, 30, said during Thursday’s Stand Your Ground hearing. Hicks, known as rapper “Key Vani,” had gone out with her friend, Nathan Smith, on Oct. 9, 2023, planning to network with music industry professionals at an event. While prosecutors have charged her with second-degree murder for shooting and killing Demetrie Harris, Hicks has maintained that she was acting in self-defense.
Hicks and Harris met for the first time on Oct. 9. After Smith came to pick Hicks up, he told her that they would also be bringing along his friend, Harris, for the evening. But when Harris got into the car, Hicks said, the mood soured.
Hicks described Harris as being mad that she was sitting in the front passenger seat. When they arrived at the first venue they were visiting, the group split up. When they left, Hicks said, Smith and Harris both seemed angry, but she didn’t know why.
The trio got back into the car and started driving to the second location they had planned to visit, but the two men bickered in the car. Hicks said that she became uncomfortable when Harris became “very loud and very aggressive” and made sexual comments toward her. “It felt like he was saying, it felt like he was testing the words to see, like, you know, can he have sex with me,” Hicks said. “Like, he wanted to have sex with me, and that wasn’t what I was there for.”
Hicks said that when Smith stopped the car, she got out and went to retrieve her purse from the trunk. The purse had promotional flyers inside as well as her gun. When the trunk wouldn’t immediately open, Hicks shouted for Smith to open it, and that, she said, made him angry. Hicks said Smith was so angry that she decided to take her purse and walk away after telling Smith, “Bro, just calm down.”
Smith then grabbed her by her shirt and threw her against the back of the car and then onto the ground, Hicks said. “I didn’t think that he would ever put his hands on me, and then once he threw me on the back of the car, that was extremely painful,” she said. “After he had slammed me against the back of the car and then down on the street, he picked me up by my neck and he was choking me as he picked me up on my neck and I could not breathe at all, and he was dragging me back as he was choking me. I just, I couldn’t breathe at all.”
Kevhani Hicks (Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation)
Surveillance video shown in court appears to show that Harris joined Smith in beating Hicks. “I was scared and panicking,” she said. She managed to kick the men off her, and tried to gather her belongings and walk away. But as she tried to leave, she said, Harris began yelling threats at her. “He’s saying things like, ‘I kill little b—es like you,’ ‘I could beat your a— to death,’ ‘I could hit you so hard that you’ll die,’ ‘You’ll die with one hit’ or ‘You’ll die with one shot,’ so I felt like he was telling me he was going to kill me.”
As the threats continued, Hicks said she was trying to walk away, but knew she couldn’t run because she was injured and had no shoes. When she heard what she thought were footsteps behind her, she assumed they were Harris. “I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna die,” she said. “I saw him pull something black out of his pocket and everything was happening so fast, I just knew, like, I believed this guy could kill me.”
Hicks said she opened fire and stopped shooting when Harris was no longer moving, and “it felt like he couldn’t hurt me.”
At that moment, Hicks said, Smith hit her with his car, causing cuts, bruises and road rash covering over half her back. She said her injuries partly explained why she never told detectives she saw Harris pull the black object from his pocket. “My brain was focused on the bigger picture of what happened to me and not the details,” she said.
Prosecutors pounced on the omitted detail at a previous hearing, when a psychologist testified for Hicks’ defense that she had told him that detail. Prosecutors accused Hicks of changing her story and adding the black object after watching the surveillance video.
Hicks’ attorney told Judge Jean Lody that the defendant’s bond expires on Nov. 17. Lody, who noted that Hicks has been coming to hearings and complying with her house arrest, said she would not have to pay additional money to remain free. She asked Hicks to surrender her passport. “For some reason, folks fleeing to South America and the Mediterranean have become a thing in this building,” Lody said.
