If you’re even somewhat familiar
with the hip hop scene,
you know that true hardcore rappers
are really living the lives
they rhyme about a lot of the time.
Most of them don’t tune down their lyrics
to seem softer
or even try to hide the things
they may have actually done,
so it’s not a surprise
that a few of these rappers
have gone past the bragging and clout-seeking
and have committed the serious crime of murder.
Here are a few rappers who are actual killers.
Da Baby
He was born Jonathan Lyndale Kirk
in Cleveland, Ohio,
but by the time he was eight years old,
he and his family had moved to Charlotte, North Carolina.
He was a pretty regular kid,
but like a lot of regular kids,
he started showing an interest in life on the street.
He’s never admitted to joining a gang though.
By the end of 2014,
a few years after graduating from high school,
he expressed an interest in rap
and decided to really go for it.
He chose his stage name Baby Jesus,
in 2015,
but he didn’t want to cause
too much controversy and alienate audiences,
so he changed it to DaBaby shortly after.
But his respect for the religious community
in the bible-belt town of Charlotte
stopped there because in 2018,
he became a killer.
It happened in the fall of that year
when the rapper was in Walmart
doing a bit of shopping.
According to witnesses,
a fight broke out between DaBaby
and another young man,
19-year-old Jalyn Craig.
And while two grown men
fighting in the produce aisle of a Walmart
sounds hilarious,
it didn’t end well at all.
During the scuffle,
DaBaby pulled out a gun and shot at Jalyn.
He was wounded
and later passed away from the injuries.
Kirk was arrested,
because he was surrounded by witnesses
in a public place,
and was charged with manslaughter.
After working with an excellent lawyer,
the charges were ultimately dropped
about six months later.
His legal team claimed
that the shooting was done in self-defense,
as the other man was attempting to rob the rapper.
He didn’t get off totally clean, though
two months later
he was found guilty on weapons charges
since he didn’t have a license to be
carrying the concealed weapon in the first place.
A simple year of probation
was all he racked up for that charge.
Tay-K
Taymor McIntire got into rap
early on in his life
and got serious about it pretty fast.
To jumpstart his career,
he formed a rap group
called Daytona Boyz
in his hometown of Arlington, Texas
in 2014.
He was only 14 at the time,
so it showed some real ambition.
The group began recording with a couple of local rappers,
Pimpyz and Santana Sage,
which brought further attention
to the young hip hop group.
They started releasing their hip hop tracks
on SoundCloud,
but it was pretty obvious
that they were just kids
and didn’t know much about the production part
of music-making.
The songs came off as silly and amateur-ish,
so while locals were listening,
they weren’t necessarily liking what they heard.
Tay got tired of being dragged down
by a group that didn’t share his ambition
and set out on a solo career.
He released his first solo in 2015
that hit the sweet spot with fans.
The positive attention gave him a boost
and he kept working.
His most infamous track to date, though,
is “The Race,”
from 2017,
which made headlines
inside the hip hop community
and out of it.
But what not a lot of people knew at the time
was that it was based on reality
and his race away from the authorities
after he became a killer.
The race technically started back in 2016
when Tay-K and several friends
came up with a plan to get cash and drugs.
All they were going to do
was just rob an acquaintance
and that was it.
Nothing else.
So he gets two girls,
19-year-old Megan Holt
and 20-year-old Ariana Bharrat,
to go into this guy’s house
to seduce him.
While the guy, Zachary Beloate,
was distracted by the girls,
one of them would open the door
for Tay and another man.
They’d come in,
flash their guns,
and take what they wanted.
But there’s always a hiccup in these plans,
and that hiccup’s name was Ethan Walker,
a friend of Zachary’s
that Tay and his friends
didn’t know would be there.
So things went south
when the robbery turned into a scuffle
and then there were shots fired.
The friend, Ethan,
was killed as they fled the apartment.
When Tay was caught and put on house arrest
to wait for his hearing,
he decided that that didn’t sound like much fun
and he’d rather head off,
so just days before his hearing,
he cut off his ankle monitor
and ran for it.
He even tweeted about going on the run.
He headed to San Antonio
and made it all the way to New Jersey
before he was caught by the police
and sent to Texas.
And unfortunately for him,
being 16 years old at the time of the murder
didn’t get him any breaks
he’s still going to be tried as an adult.
YNW Melly
Jamell Demons,
better known as YNW Melly
is probably one of the most controversial
rappers in the last few years.
He’s barely at the legal drinking age
and has seen more than a lot of people do
in their whole lifetimes.
He was raised mostly by his young single mother,
who had him during her freshman year of high school
at just 14 years old.
Being a young teen mom isn’t easy,
so she struggled to provide for her and her kid.
And because she was working so much
and was away from the home most of the time,
Jamell started hanging out
more and more on the streets.
When he was in his early teens,
he joined up with the Bloods,
looking for some kind of family stability.
But as we see over and over,
joining a gang
hardly ever leads to a good life,
and Melly’s experience was no different.
He started messing around with drugs
and guns
and before long
he was getting into real trouble.
First,
when he was just 16,
he was arrested for shooting a gun
towards a bunch of people
near Vero Beach High School.
He was supposedly aiming at three people,
students at the high school.
No one was hurt
and he got off with charges
of aggravated assault
and discharging a firearm in a public place.
It earned him a year in a jail,
where he wrote his famous
“Murder on My Mind”
after some inmates encouraged him.
But the real turning point
in Melly’s criminal history
appeared in October of 2018.
The way Melly told it,
he was out with some friends,
YNW Juvy,
YNW Sakchaser,
and YNW Bortlen,
driving around town
when another car pulled up to their right
and started shooting into the vehicle.
Bortlen was unhurt so he drove Juvy
and Sakchaser to the emergency room
but they were pronounced dead.
From the beginning,
Melly said that he wasn’t even in the car
during the shootout.
After investigation though,
it was obvious that things didn’t go down
the way Melly said.
First of all,
there was no way that the bullets
could've come from the right side of the vehicle,
where Bortlen said the other car was.
Each victim was shot in the head from the left.
Surveillance footage shows
all four of them getting into the car together
with none other than Melly himself
sitting in the left rear passenger seat.
Plus,
phone GPS records
show that Melly was with them
at the time of the shooting
and that they drove around
with the dead bodies of their friends
in the car for a while
as they tried to figure out what to do.
In February of 2019,
Melly was arrested on two counts
of first-degree murder.
He’s hanging out in jail while he awaits trial.