New York Daily News: BROOKLYN, By Ellen Moynihan – A talented teen fatally shot in a parked car on a Brooklyn street is the most recent in a string of rappers targeted from the drill rap scene, family members said Monday.
Jayquan McKenley, 18, who performed as Chii Wvttz, was ambushed early Sunday as he left a recording studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Though McKenley lived in the Bronx, he traveled to Brooklyn to pursue his passion, relatives said.
“Jayquan was a good kid,” said his mother’s cousin, Shawn Holmes, 46. “He had a very kind heart and he had a passion for rapping.”
McKenley had no sooner left a recording studio at 2:15am Sunday when he was attacked while sitting in a car at Greene and Lewis Aves., police and the family said.
“Music was something he was passionate about,” said Holmes. “I heard he had just left out of the studio.”
The studio was actually a space rented through Airbnb, and McKenley was leaving with a gal pal and other members of his group when a car rolled up on them and someone opened, police sources said.
Detectives are trying to find out if his killing is linked to a shooting in the Bronx in August in which no one was hit, sources said. Cops haven’t tied his killing directly to the drill rap scene yet, sources said.
Holmes, who said McKenley had lived for a time with his father in North Carolina, told the Daily News he wished his young cousin had stayed there.
“In the city it’s kind of tough, living in the projects,” said Holmes. “Look what happened.”
“He’s a good kid, he comes from a good family,” he added. “He was the oldest out of his mother’s children; he was a role model to them.”
The slaying comes just days after another young drill rapper was cut down.
Tahjay Dobson, 22, known to drill rap fans as TDott Woo, was shot and killed in Canarsie hours after signing a record contract on Feb. 1.
On Jan. 27, rapper Nas Blixky was ambushed in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The 22-year-old, whose real name is Nasir Fisher, survived and has vowed to change his stage surname, which is slang for gun.
“The drill is the devil’s music,” Perry Williams, McKenley’s father, told Fox5 News, decrying the genre’s themes that are dominated by “drugs” and “death.”
“Our hip-hop is no longer hip-hop anymore,” Williams lamented.
