Nicki Minaj arranged for her dad to visit before hit-and-run tragedy

Nicki Minaj’s father, Robert Maraj, 64, died in February 2021 after a car struck him in Mineola, New York. Minaj has revealed they spoke shortly before the tragedy to plan a trip to California to meet her baby son for the first time.

In a conversation with Apple Music’s Ebro Darden, Nicki explained, “So right after I had the baby, and it was during corona (COVID-19), and nobody knew what was going on. But that day, as I’m rocking him (her son), the phone rings, and I see it’s my father. I normally would not have picked up, because I don’t like to be on the phone with the baby there. I would’ve called him back. [But] something said, ‘Pick up the phone’.

“I picked up, he was very happy, and he was like: ‘Baby, I could come on Monday?’ Because he had been waiting to be able to come to Cali to help me. I kept on saying: ‘Come on out’. He wasn’t really happy, but I knew that, when he came [to] be with us, we were going to be happy. He is this amazing, great person, who livens up the whole house. I was like: ‘Yes, we were going to get help’,” the musician added.

However, the trip never happened because just hours later Minaj got a call from her mum Carol who broke the terrible news that Maraj had been involved in an accident.

Nicki added, “[The phone rang again]. It was my mother, telling me that my father was in an accident and that she didn’t know what was going to happen, and she would call me back. And then, everything started spinning. [I] couldn’t believe [how quickly everything happened]; it was the happiest that I had heard him in a long time.”

Nicki further clarified that she paid tribute to her late father on her new album ‘Pink Friday 2’. The opening track, Are You Gone Already, features her talking to him, expressing regret that he never had the chance to meet her son, affectionately nicknamed Papa Bear.