BAY HARBOR ISLANDS, Fla. – Newly-obtained body camera video sheds light on the events leading to the arrest of 27-year-old Phillip Katsabanis, the South Florida rapper better known as Stitches, earlier this month.
Bay Harbor Islands police arrested Katsabanis, whose albums include “Cocaine Holiday,” “I Need Rehab” and “Married to the Bricks,” on charges of felony cocaine possession and misdemeanor discharge of a firearm.
The Aug. 3 police body camera video shows Katsabanis telling police he called them because he thought he saw four people in his building.
“I don’t have a problem with nobody, bro,” Katsabanis—whom officers commented seemed “a little bit intoxicated”—told police in the body cam video. “It’s expensive equipment, you know. So I prepared my head expecting that because it’s happened to other studios. And the ones that I actually (unintelligible) because we didn’t have our kids today, so I wanted to watch movies or whatever. Just bought a house yesterday.”
“What is it, you bought a house yesterday?” the officer replies.
“Yeah, Naples bro,” Katsabanis said.
Katsabanis sticks with his story and police looked for his gun.
“Honestly really scared because, bro, I’m outnumbered,” he said in the video. “There’s no fight, you know. I don’t have problems with nobody, officer.”
“I don’t have any indication or anything,” the officer says. “Luckily, it looks like nobody got hurt. You guys are okay, you know.”
Katsabanis asked if he was allowed to defend his business.
“Of course, your business, your home, yourself,” the officer replied.
Ultimately, police couldn’t find anything—except cocaine, they said. At the end of all this, it was Stitches who got arrested.
The rapper didn’t have anything to say to Local 10 News when he got out of jail earlier this month.