No regrets.
Sentenced last week to 15 years in prison, former “Bad Boy” rapper G. Dep still believes that confessing to a 2-decades-old murder was the right thing to do — even though he had gotten away with it.
“No, never,” the rapper said, when asked if doubt or regret had begun to set in.
“Maybe at the end of serving time or after looking back, someone might feel differently,” he said, speaking from Rikers Island, where he is housed pending a transfer into the state prison system.
“But now I feel what I did was right.”
Two years ago, the rapper — whose given name is Trevell Coleman — walked into a Harlem station house and told surprised cops that he had shot a man.
When he was around 18 years old and looking for easy money, he bought a .40 caliber pistol, he told them.
He tried to mug a stranger, a man standing alone in the middle of the night at the corner of Park Avenue and 114th Street. There was a struggle for the gun, G. Dep told cops, and he fired at the stranger three times before fleeing.
Cops matched the confession to the unsolved 1993 shooting of John Henkel, 32, and broke the news to Coleman: He was wanted for murder because Henkel had died.
Asked by The Post what advice he would have given his teen self, G. Dep replied, “I would have told myself to stop playing with guns.
“Sometimes you think things happen for a reason, and if I wasn’t who I was then, like maybe my daughter would have never been born,” he added, speaking of his 11-year-old girl
G. Dep is also the father of 5-year-old twin boys.
“Who knows how things would have turned out? But I definitely would have told myself to stop messing with guns.”
Remarkably, his wife, who’d urged him not to confess, is “starting to understand why I did it,” he said.
“I think my daughter understands why,” he added. “My sons, they know that I’m in jail. I talk to them a lot,” he said of his boys, who will be grown men by the time he is released.
Of his relationship with God, he said, “We’re good. I hope someday he will forgive me. I pray a lot. I read the Bible. I try to read a chapter a day.”
Asked if he had forgiven himself, he said, “No, I’m working on it.”
He is using his time in jail to write music, to work on an autobiography and to work out and jog, he said. “Got to keep the blood circulating,” he said.
“Otherwise you start thinking and get trapped in your own head.”