A week after rapping “you don’t even know how to shoot” in an online music video aimed at members of a rival gang, Chicago rapper Young Pappy has been shot and killed.
According to the Chicago Tribune, around 1:35 a.m. Friday, 20-year-old rapper Shaquon Thomas, a suspected gang member who was also known as “Young Pappy,” was walking with a friend on North Kenmore Avenue in the city’s Uptown neighborhood when someone opened fire.
Police told the paper Thomas was hit twice in the back and taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead just over an hour later.
While Thomas posted several gangster rap videos online this year, one published on YouTube May 22 called “Shooters,” brags about targeting rival gangs for murder.
“Gotta a whole lotta shooters on the squad, gotta squad for the shooters. … If I catch an op, I’m smokin’ them,” Young Pappy raps. In the video, the 20-year-old also says, “you don’t even know how to shoot.”
Watch “Shooters” below:
***Explicit Content Warning***
The Tribune reports Thomas had been the target of two other shootings, and in both instances, an innocent bystander was left dead.
In February of 2014, a masked gunman targeted Pappy inside a McDonald’s, and instead killed 17-year-old Markeyo Carr, who just happened to be eating at the restaurant. In July of the same year, 28-year-old Wil Lewis was waiting for a bus to take him to a new job when bullets intended for Thomas struck him in the back and head.
In both cases, Thomas was wounded, but walked away.
That was not the case Friday, as the 20-year-old was killed just a block from where the music video for “Shooters” was filmed.
Three street gangs, the Conservative Vice Lords, the Gangster Disciples, and the Black P Stones, have been feuding in the Uptown neighborhood recently, the paper reports
According to police, Thomas was a member of the Gangster Disciples, and no arrests have been made.
Many who live in the neighborhood of Friday’s shooting told Chicago-based WGN the rapper’s lifestyle finally caught up with him, with one area woman stating, “sooner or later, they’ll get you.”
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