3:45 p.m. a tweet, eight words. “I’m on 069 I’m out here.” 5 hours later, 18-year-old Joseph Coleman, known as Lil Jojo, was dead. Shot off the back of a bicycle near 69th Street and Princeton Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, the exact location he just broadcast to the world on Twitter. The murder was never solved.
The tweet was never deleted. And the pattern it set, post your location get killed, would repeat itself across America for the next decade and counting. That’s what this story is about. Not just Lil Jojo, but the dozens of young rappers and street figures who died because they couldn’t stop posting.
Because the same phones they used to build their audiences, flex their lifestyles, and taunt their enemies also handed those enemies a real-time map to their front door. Because in a world where clout is currency and visibility is everything, going dark felt worse than getting shot. But the real question ain’t who pulled the trigger that night in Englewood.
It’s how social media turned from a tool for clout and flexing into a real-time tracking system that’s gotten dozens of young rappers and street figures killed across America. How does a tweet, an Instagram story, a TikTok video become the last thing you ever post? That story don’t start with Lil Jojo in 2012.
It starts with the rise of drill music, smartphone cameras, and a generation that grew up documenting every moment of their lives online. Never realizing that the same technology connecting them to fans was also connecting them to killers. Joseph Coleman was born on April 6th, 1994 in Chicago, Illinois to his mother, Robin Wilson.
His father’s identity has not been disclosed publicly, but what’s known is that his father was sentenced to 13 years in prison for attempted murder when Joseph was young. Robin raised Joseph and his older brother, rapper Swagg Dinero, at 69th and Parnell Avenue in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.
Englewood in the 1990s and 2000s was a war zone. Gang violence between the Gangster Disciples and Black Disciples had turned the neighborhood into one of the most dangerous areas in America. Young boys joined gangs for protection, for identity, for the only family structure many of them knew.
Joseph was initiated into the local Gangster Disciples gang while still in his teens. His membership was confirmed by Chicago law enforcement. During his high school years, Joseph began rapping under the name Lil Jojo. His material was primarily drill music, a subgenre of hip hop that was exploding in Chicago in the early 2010.
Drill music was raw, violent, and hyper local. Rappers namedrop specific blocks, specific enemies, specific murders. It wasn’t metaphorical. When Chief Keef rapped about bodies, he meant actual bodies. And when Lil Jojo responded with diss tracks, he was declaring war. According to his brother Swagg Dinero, Joseph began rapping as a reaction to a song by Lil Durk that mocked and threatened the Gangster Disciples.
Jojo gained notice in Chicago after self-releasing the song 300K on April 27th, 2012. The track was a response to Chief Keef’s song 3Hunna. And the K in Jojo’s title stood for killer. BDK meant Black Disciple Killer. It was created with fellow rapper King Lil Jay, and it used Chief Keef and producer Young Chop’s instrumental from Everyday as the backing track.
The song didn’t just taunt Keef and his camp by remixing their music. It was a murder anthem targeting Keef’s gang, his neighborhood, and his affiliates. Many citizens of Chicago believe BDK fueled the ongoing gang war rampant in the South Side at the time. The beef escalated throughout the summer of 2012.
Lil Jojo released more diss tracks. Chief Keef, Lil Reese, and Lil Durk responded with their own music and social media posts. Twitter became a battlefield where teenagers threatened to kill each other in real time, and their followers watched like it was entertainment. On September 4th, 2012, Jojo and his friend drove around looking for Lil Reese.
When they found him, Jojo filmed the confrontation, taunting Reese and calling him names. Reese threatened him back. The video went viral almost immediately. Later that day, Jojo took to Twitter. He was feeling invincible, like he’d won the confrontation. He tweeted at Lil Durk, calling him names. He tweeted at Chief Keef.
He tweeted at Lil Reese. And then at 3:45 p.m., he tweeted his location, “I’m on 069 I am out here.” Witnesses later reported that around 9:00 p.m., Joseph was riding on the back of his friend’s bicycle near 69th Street and Princeton Avenue when a Ford Taurus pulled up. Surveillance video that surfaced years later showed Joseph being chased on his bike, the Taurus close behind. Shots rang out.
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Joseph tried to pedal faster, but was hit. He collapsed and died shortly after. Hours after Jojo’s death, Chief Keef tweeted, “It’s sad cuz that [ __ ] Jojo wanted to be just like us. #lmao” The tweet sparked massive controversy. Police investigated Keef, Lil Reese, and Lil Durk as possible suspects or people with knowledge of the murder.
Keef later claimed his Twitter account had been hacked, though few believed him. Chicago police hypothesized that Keef Kiki Bonds, a 26-year-old Black Disciple member, was Coleman’s murder. But Bonds was fatally shot himself on September 17th, 2012, just 13 days after Jojo’s death. The case remains officially unsolved to this day.
Jojo’s murder became a turning point in Chicago’s gang violence. A few months later, a teenager named Joshua JayLoud Davis was murdered for allegedly wearing a hoodie in commemoration of Jojo using his rapper name in Black Disciple territory. The hoodie displayed the phrase “Jojo World”, a term gangs use to honor dead affiliates.
The murders of Coleman and Davis initiated widespread discussions about how drill music and social media were fueling gang wars, turning beefs that might have stayed local into viral spectacles that demanded retaliation. But Jojo’s case was just the beginning. The pattern he set, tweeting a location and getting killed hours later, would repeat itself across the country over the next decade, becoming a blueprint for how social media exposure could turn deadly.
Before we get to the cases that followed, it’s worth adding one that happened between Jojo and Indian RedBoy, because it showed the pattern wasn’t limited to gang beefs or known targets. On February 19th, 2020, 20-year-old Pop Smoke, real name Bashar Barakah Jackson, one of the most exciting rising rappers in the country, was killed in a home invasion at a rented Hollywood Hills mansion in Los Angeles.
He hadn’t tweeted a location or gone live on Instagram. He’d done something even simpler. Posted a video to his Instagram story showing off gift bags from fashion brand Amiri, and the delivery label on one of the bags had the home address printed on it. His own talent manager saw it and asked him to take it down.
By then, it was too late. Around 4:30 a.m., four masked men broke into the house and shot him three times. He was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and pronounced dead. He’d been in LA for just 4 days. LAPD Captain John Tippet later confirmed that investigators were confident the suspects got his location directly from the social media post.
The killers didn’t know Pop Smoke personally. They didn’t have gang beef with him. They saw the address, they drove to it, and they killed him. Pop Smoke had 7.6 million Instagram followers at the time of his death. His posthumous debut album went to number one on the Billboard 200. And the lesson his death should have taught every artist in the game, that even a 1-second slip in a flex video can hand your address to a killer, wasn’t learned.
Nearly a decade after Lil Jojo’s murder, the same pattern played out in Los Angeles with even more horrific visibility. On July 8th, 2021, at around 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time, 21-year-old Zerail Dijon Rivera, known as Indian RedBoy, was sitting in his car in the parking lot of a multi-level gated apartment complex on South Chadron Avenue in Hawthorne, talking and laughing with a friend named Capone.
35,000 followers were watching the stream. Everything seemed normal. Indian RedBoy was smiling, joking around, having a good time. And then without warning, an assailant walked up to his car window and opened fire. The attack was captured in real time. At least 12 shots were fired. Indian RedBoy’s expression changed from joy to shock to terror in seconds.
The car filled with smoke. Blood ran from his head and nose. He turned to the camera and mouthed the word help repeatedly. His friend Capone, watching from his own location, screamed into the phone asking what was happening, asking where he was. Indian RedBoy whispered, “I’m in Hawthorne” before dropping his phone.
The Instagram live stream ended. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Zerail Rivera was born in Crenshaw, South Los Angeles, and was affiliated with the Bloods gang. He’d built a following on social media for his music and his willingness to disrespect rivals publicly. Several videos on YouTube allegedly showed him disrespecting late rapper Nipsey Hussle, who was known to be [ __ ] affiliated and was considered a beloved figure in Los Angeles after his 2019 murder.
One video allegedly showed Indian RedBoy vandalizing a mural of Nipsey. The disrespect enraged [ __ ] affiliated gangs across LA, and many believe Indian RedBoy was killed in retaliation. Lieutenant T. Gets of the Hawthorne Police Department described the shooting as a walk-up attack, saying Rivera appeared to have been targeted and appeared to be a gang member.
What made Indian Redboy’s murder unique wasn’t just that it was gang-related, it was that it happened on Instagram live, broadcast to tens of thousands of people in real time. Viewers watched him die. They watched the fear in his eyes. They watched him beg for help, and they couldn’t do anything to save him.
The video went viral, traumatizing people who stumbled across it on social media. Many expressed regret for watching, saying the footage was brutal and haunting. The murder remains under investigation, but no suspects have been publicly identified. Indian Redboy’s real-time visibility, his constant posting on social media, his willingness to show exactly where he was and what he was doing made him an easy target.
Unlike Lil Jojo, who tweeted a location and was killed hours later, Indian Redboy was killed while actively broadcasting his location to the world. If Indian Redboy’s murder showed of Instagram live, Julio Foolio’s death in 2024 showed how persistent location sharing over multiple posts could lead killers directly to their target.
Charles Andrew Jones II, known professionally as Julio Foolio, was born on June 21st, 1998 in Jacksonville, Florida. He grew up in the Moncrief neighborhood and was a member of the Six Block set of the street gang KTA, which stands for Kill Them All. His father, Charles Andrew Jones, was murdered in a 2011 shooting in Jacksonville when Julio was just 13 years old.
The violence that took his father would eventually take him, too. Foolio rose to prominence in Jacksonville’s drill rap scene in the late 2010s. His music addressed his gang affiliations directly, and he was involved in a high-profile deadly feud with rapper Yungeen Ace and the ATK gang, which stands for Ace Top Killers. The beef began in 2017 when Foolio’s 18-year-old cousin, Zion Malik Brown, was shot and killed in his home.
This is believed to have started the gang war that would claim dozens of lives over the next 7 years. In June 2018, Yungeen Ace, his brother Trayvon Bullard, and two friends, Royale DeVaughn Smith Jr. and Jacquavius De’Shon Grover, went to a Jacksonville Town Center restaurant to celebrate Ace’s brother’s birthday.
Gunmen opened fire in what’s believed to have been retaliation for Zion Brown’s death. Trayvon Bullard, Royale Smith, and Jacquavius Grover were all killed. Yungeen Ace survived after being shot eight times. Following the shooting, Julio Foolio made several posts on social media glorifying the killings.
He created a T-shirt airbrushed with a photo of Royale DeVaughn Smith Jr. that said, “Rest in piss, 23.” The disrespect was intentional, calculated, designed to provoke. Over the next 6 years, Foolio survived multiple assassination attempts. He was shot and wounded in Houston, Texas in July 2023. On October 7th, 2023, he was shot in the foot while driving in Jacksonville.
In an April 2024 Instagram post, Foolio commented on the tragic multiple attempts on my life. He knew he was a target. He knew people wanted him dead, but he kept posting. He kept sharing his location. He kept flexing online like he was untouchable. On June 21st, 2024, Foolio turned 26 years old.
He decided to celebrate his birthday in Tampa, Florida, about 200 miles south of Jacksonville. On June 14th, a promotional poster for his June 22nd birthday party was posted to social media. On June 22nd, Foolio posted to his Instagram that he was heading to Tampa for a pool party. He advertised the location of the event, telling people if they already had the address to pull up between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m.
He posted photos and videos from Teasers, a gentlemen’s club in Tampa. He posted about the pool party at an Airbnb. Everything was public. Everything was documented. Tampa Police Chief Lee Bercaw would later say that Foolio posted his location on social media several times throughout the night, and surveillance footage showed suspects following him from location to location.
According to Foolio’s attorney, Lewis Fusco, police showed up at the Airbnb and forced the party to leave because too many people were there, exceeding occupancy limits. Foolio posted about getting kicked out, saying, “Lit everywhere we go,” and that they were moving the party to a new location. He booked a room at a Holiday Inn on McKinley Drive. At 4:15 a.m.
on June 23rd, surveillance cameras captured vehicles following Foolio to the Holiday Inn. Instead of following him into the parking lot, the suspects staged across the street and waited. At 4:38 a.m., three shooters exited a vehicle armed with a handgun and two rifles and walked into the hotel parking lot.
They opened fire on Foolio’s car, hitting him in the heart, lungs, and aorta. Three other people in the parking lot were wounded, but survived. Foolio was pronounced dead at the scene. Police arrested five suspects: Isaiah Chance Jr., 21; Alicia Andrews, 21; Shawn Gathright, 18; Davion Murphy, 27; and Rasheed Murphy, 30.
All were affiliated with or members of the ATK and 1200 gangs, rivals to Foolio’s Six Block gang. Tampa Police Chief Bercaw said the suspects were caught on camera following Foolio from location to location before the shooting, using his Instagram posts to track his movements throughout the night.
The planning was methodical. They traveled from Jacksonville to Tampa specifically to kill him, and Foolio had made it easy by broadcasting exactly where he’d be. Hillsborough County State Attorney Suzy Lopez described the planning of Foolio’s death as truly alarming, saying the feud stops here and that all five defendants were facing life in Florida State Prison.
Jacksonville Sheriff TK Waters noted that the feud between Six Block and ATK 1200 had spanned over a decade with dozens of murders on both sides. In October 2025, Alicia Andrews was convicted of manslaughter and acquitted of conspiracy to commit murder. The others await trial.
The cases of Lil Jojo, Indian Redboy, and Julio Foolio represent three different ways social media location sharing can lead to murder. Jojo tweeted a street intersection and was killed hours later. Indian Redboy went live on Instagram and was killed in real time. Foolio posted his location repeatedly throughout a single night and was tracked by assassins who followed him from spot to spot until they had the perfect opportunity to strike.
But these aren’t the only cases. The pattern has repeated itself across the country, claiming victims who were already targets due to gang conflicts, rap beefs, or street reputations. The social media posts didn’t create the enemies, but they made it exponentially easier for those enemies to find and kill them.
FYB Trigger, a Chicago drill figure, posted his location on social media before being killed at or near that same spot. His death followed ongoing tensions in Chicago’s drill scene, and his visibility on social media increased his risk. Gakirah KI Barnes, a 17-year-old gang-affiliated figure in Chicago, was already a known target in an ongoing conflict between factions.
According to some accounts, she shared her location shortly before being shot and killed in a targeted attack in 2014. Whether the location exposure was direct or indirect, it may have made it easier for attackers to find her. KI was unusual in Chicago’s gang landscape because she was female, but deeply involved in the violence, reportedly connected to multiple retaliatory killings.
Her social media presence was prolific, filled with taunts directed at rivals, and her murder became another data point in the discussion about how online activity fuels real-world violence. And then there’s Tan da God. On July 13th, 2024, the young Oakland rapper posted a flyer on social media inviting fans to a meet and greet she was hosting outside Glamour Beauty Supply on Telegraph Avenue.
She shared the address publicly, told people to come through, asked them to show support. At around 5:00 p.m., she was shot and killed outside the same beauty supply store she just advertised on her own page. She didn’t have a known gang beef. She wasn’t taunting rivals. She was promoting herself, and someone used that promotion to find her and end her life.
Bay Area legend Mistah Fab, who had been scheduled to appear alongside her, but changed his plans last minute, mourned her on Instagram. “I will always remember you as a hustling-ass go-getter with a world of ambition, drive, and courage.” Tan da God’s case is perhaps the most chilling of all because it showed the danger isn’t limited to rappers deep in street conflict.
It can reach anyone who publicly shares where they’ll be. The common thread in all these cases is that the victims were already targets. They were involved in gang conflicts, rap beefs, or street disputes that had been simmering for months or years. The social media posts didn’t create the danger, but they acted as a force multiplier, reducing the time and effort attackers needed to locate and kill their targets.
In the past, finding someone in a city the size of Chicago, Los Angeles, or Jacksonville required street-level intelligence, informants, people willing to snitch. Now, all it takes is scrolling through Instagram stories or checking someone’s Twitter feed. Law enforcement and violence prevention experts have been sounding the alarm about this trend for over a decade.
After Lil Jojo’s murder in 2012, Chicago police and community leaders warned young people about the dangers of posting locations online, but the warnings largely went unheard. For many young rappers and street figures, social media clout is currency. Flexing online, showing off wealth, broadcasting your movements, all of that builds your reputation.
And in the world of drill rap and gang culture, reputation is everything. It’s how you get fans. It’s how you intimidate rivals. It’s how you prove you’re not hiding, that you’re not scared. The psychological component can’t be ignored, either. Many of these young men grew up documenting their entire lives on social media, posting location tags, sharing Instagram stories, going live on TikTok.
All of that is normal behavior for their generation. They don’t see it as dangerous. They see it as connection, as community, as proof that they’re living the life they rap about. The idea that every post could be monitored by enemies, that every location tag could be used to plan an ambush, doesn’t register until it’s too late.
There’s also a performative aspect. In drill music culture, authenticity is paramount. Rappers who claim to be in the streets but then hide or move cautiously are called out as frauds. Julio himself had survived multiple shootings and continued to post publicly, almost daring his enemies to try again.
To stop posting, to go dark on social media, to hide your location would be seen as weakness. And in that world, weakness gets you disrespected, which can be just as dangerous as getting killed. The technology has only gotten more sophisticated. Geo location tags on Instagram and Snapchat show exact addresses.
Live streams broadcast in real time with minimal delay. Even without explicitly stating a location, background details in photos and videos, landmarks, street signs, storefronts can give away where someone is. Digital forensics experts can often pinpoint locations based on metadata, shadows, reflections.
The attackers don’t need to be tech geniuses. They just need to pay attention. Social media companies have implemented some safety features. Instagram and Facebook allow users to add locations after a post rather than in real time. Snapchat has a ghost mode that hides your location from others. But these features are opt-in and many users, especially young people trying to build followings, don’t use them.
The platforms also face criticism for not doing enough to detect and prevent the kind of threatening language and real-time targeting that leads to violence. But the bigger question is whether technology alone can solve a problem rooted in poverty, gang violence, and a culture that glorifies street conflict.
Lil Jojo, Indian Red Boy, Julio Foolio, and countless others weren’t killed by social media. They were killed by people who wanted them dead for reasons that had nothing to do with Instagram or Twitter. Social media was just the tool that made the killings easier to execute. Today, the pattern continues.
Young rappers and street figures still post their locations. They still go live on Instagram. They still tag themselves at restaurants, clubs, hotels, and their enemies still watch, still wait, still use that information to plan attacks. In 2024 alone, multiple drill rappers were killed in circumstances where social media played a role in their exposure.
The music industry has responded with mixed results. Some labels and managers now require artists with known beefs to limit their social media presence or use security when posting publicly. Others see the controversy and danger as part of the marketing, the kind of authenticity that sells records and builds fan bases.
Dead rappers become legends. Their streaming numbers spike. Their unreleased music gets put out posthumously. There’s a perverse incentive structure where violence, including murder, can be financially beneficial for everyone except the person who died. Community organizations in cities like Chicago, Jacksonville, and Los Angeles have tried intervention programs, reaching out to young rappers involved in beefs to broker peace or at least de-escalate tensions.
Some efforts have succeeded in preventing specific murders. Others have failed spectacularly with mediators themselves becoming targets or being accused of snitching. Parents of victims have become advocates, speaking out about how social media contributed to their children’s deaths and urging young people to be smarter about what they post.
Robin Wilson, Lil Jojo’s mother, has spoken publicly about the pain of losing her son and the role she believes Chief Keef and social media played in his murder. But these warnings often fall on deaf ears, dismissed as out of touch or not understanding the culture. So, what do you call a generation that documents everything online, that treats social media like a reality show where every moment needs to be shared, every location needs to be tagged, every thought needs to be tweeted? What do you call young men who know their targets, who’ve survived shootings, who’ve seen their friends killed, but keep posting anyway because the alternative, silence and invisibility, feels like surrender? That’s the question America’s been asking since 2012, since Lil Jojo tweeted, “I’m on 069, I’m out here.” and got killed 5 hours later. Right now, somewhere in Chicago, Los Angeles, Jacksonville, Atlanta, New York, a young rapper is posting his location to Instagram.
He’s going live. He’s tagging the club, the restaurant, the hotel. His enemies are watching. They’re screenshotting. They’re planning. And unless something changes, unless this generation learns that social media visibility can be a death sentence, the pattern Lil Jojo set in 2012 will keep repeating.
Because in the world of drill rap and gang culture, the biggest flex is being visible, being fearless, being everywhere at once. But that same visibility, that same fearlessness, that same everywhere at once energy is exactly what gets you killed.
