Montego Bay, St. James. A parish that has produced some of Jamaica’s brightest musical talent and some of its most brutal street violence. From the hills of Norwood to the sprawling community of flankers, St. James has always been a place where ambition and danger walk the same road.
It is from this world that Matthew Smith was born on August 22nd, 1994. the young man the world would come to know as Rajin King. And his story, when you really look at it up close, is not just a story about music. It is a story about survival, about streets that shape you whether you want them to or not. About bullets that change everything in a single afternoon.
And about a system that will catch up with you no matter how far you travel or how many hits you drop. Let’s start from the beginning because this story doesn’t make sense unless you understand where he came from. Matthew Smith grew up in a place called Flankers, one of the toughest communities in Montego Bay.
He attended Flanker’s Primary and Junior High School, then went on to Irwin High School. But school was not going to be his path forward. Life in those communities had a way of interrupting plans and Matthew left school before completing his studies. What he had though from the time he was a child was a gift.
He was writing his own lyrics almost as soon as he could hold a pen. Music was not just something he liked. It was something he he needed. And when you come from a place like Flankers, you need something to hold on to. By 2013, when Matthew was around 18 years old, he decided to test that gift publicly. He entered the Magnum Kings and Queens talent show, performing under the stage name JB. He was eliminated.
Most people would have taken that as a sign to give it up. He didn’t. He went back home, kept writing, kept recording, and started building. The name Jabi eventually gave way to a name that would mean something entirely different. Rian King, the trap dance hall king. And that name was not chosen by accident. It was a declaration.
He was telling you exactly what he was. What made Rey King stand out early on was his approach. His team was smart. They flooded the streets and the internet with his music before they ever put a face to the name. People were singing along to his songs, playing his rhythms in their cars and at their parties before they even knew what he looked like.
When the face was finally revealed, the demand was already there. His first proper hit, a song called Featherweight, was released in August 2016 and racked up over 1.4 million views on YouTube. The Montego Bay streets were claiming him. The diaspora was listening. Something was building. Then 2018 came and everything changed. That year, Raen King became a household name across Jamaica and the Caribbean.
He dropped song after song, How Me Grow, Things Go, Change, Tough, Powerful, Learn, and each one hit harder than the last. His sound was something new. People called it Trap Dance Hall, and he wore that title like a crown. He was taking the raw, gritty energy of American trap music and mixing it with dance hall’s rhythm and swagger in a way that felt completely natural, like it had always existed.
And he was just the one brave enough to name it. The streets gravitated to him because his lyrics spoke directly to the life they were living. He wasn’t performing a fantasy. He was reporting from the front lines. The moment that cemented him as a genuine superstar came at reggae sumfest 2018 held at Katherine Hall in Montego Bay.
Reagan King was given 8 minutes to perform. Just 8 minutes. He took the stage and didn’t leave it until 15 minutes had passed. At one point, the stage manager actually cut his microphone trying to force him off. Matthew Smith reached over, grabbed another microphone off a drum set, and kept going. The crowd went insane. That night, the dance hall world understood that this young man from Flankers was not going away.
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He was just getting started. By 2019, he was performing across Jamaica, the United States, Europe, and Canada. The international bookings were coming in. The talks of crossover collaborations were real. A young man from one of Montego Bay’s most difficult communities was standing on stages around the world. And then the streets of Jamaica, the same street that helped build him, reached out and tried to take it all away.
On Sunday afternoon, June 28th, 2020, Ryan King left his community in Norwood, St. James around 2:00 p.m. with a group of people including his girlfriend Sasha Lee Blackwood, a 28-year-old customer service representative from Irwin Meadows, St. James, two children, his manager Ramsay, and others in what was a multi-vehicle entourage.
They were traveling through West Morland on their way to a function in a neighboring parish. Somewhere along the strewey main road in West Morland, one of the vehicles in the entourage got into a collision with another car being driven by a woman. They pulled over. They spent around 45 minutes on the side of the road dealing with the aftermath of that accident, exchanging information, looking at the damage, just handling business like any normal group of people would. Then a strange care appeared.
A masked gunman stepped out of that vehicle and opened fire on the group. What followed was chaos. Sasha Lee Blackwood was shot where she sat in the car next to the two children. She was pronounced dead. Another male in the group was also shot and injured. Ryan King ran. He jumped over a concrete drain and fell into a ditch.
He couldn’t get up. It was in that moment lying in a gully on the side of a West Morland road that he realized what had happened to him. He had been shot three times, once in the back, once in the leg, and bullets had done damage that no one fully understood yet. His baby mother, Kayia, ran to the ditch and tried to pull him out herself.
She couldn’t manage it alone. A stranger passing by helped her lift him out. They got him to Savannah Lamar Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery. Police at the time linked the shooting to a gang feud involving men from Norwood, St. James, the very community where Rey King lived. Sources told Urban Islands that the attack was a violent retaliation.
that earlier in 2020, a man who was considered a top figure from a rival Montego Bay neighborhood had been killed allegedly by people connected to Raen King circle. This allegedly was the payback. The shooter, according to sources, was not targeting Raen King, the artist. He was targeting Ryan King, the man, the one people in those streets knew as the top dog from where he was from.
The music career was irrelevant to whoever pulled that trigger. In their eyes, he was just another name in a feud. Raen King survived. But survival came with a price that nobody on the outside could fully see right away. In the weeks and months that followed, his management team denied that he was paralyzed. He himself denied it, not wanting the world to see him in a position of weakness.
But by 2022, when he sat down with the Jamaica Observer in a wheelchair and finally spoke the truth, the picture became clear. One of the bullets had grazed his spinal cord. He was unable to walk. He had been unable to walk since that afternoon in Struy, West Morland in June 2020. He had been doing therapy, seeing specialists, going through surgeries, fighting every single day just to have a shot at standing on his own feet again.
He described those years as a rocky road that most people never saw because he refused to cry out on the internet. I don’t know anyone who is in a position like me in a one tragic unfortunate situation like me and who hold it like how me hold it. He said three youths at home. the primary bread winner for his family, unable to do stage shows, living with a level of pain that most people will never understand.
In June 2021, he flew out of Jamaica for the first time since the shooting, traveling in first class on a Caribbean Airlines flight to the United States for intensive consultations with autotopedic specialists. The plan was to get the best possible medical attention and to explore every option available for his recovery.
He checked into a private facility for a week-long rehabilitative program. By early 2023, videos were circulating on Instagram of Rey King in physical therapy sessions with mechanical legs strapped to his body being guided by therapists as he worked to walk again. God above all things. He wrote as a caption. He was determined. He made it clear.
He believed a miracle was coming. He also made music. That is who Matthew Smith has always been. Even in a wheelchair, even when his lungs were compromised by the injuries, even when the pain was relentless, he went into the studio and recorded. He channeled everything he was going through into an album he called Therapy. Released on September 9th, 2022 through his own label, Ryan Trap Records.
The title track hit number one with over a million views in its first 3 days. The music video showed him in a wheelchair, wheeling himself to the front of a group therapy session, introducing himself to the room by his real name. Hello everybody. My name is Matthew. I got shot about two years ago.
That image, a paralyzed dance hall king sitting in a circle of people rebuilding their lives, hit his audience somewhere deep. The album sold 750 units in its first week in the United States alone. His sophomore album, Recovery, followed in 2024, continuing the same raw, honest documentation of his fight. Songs called Firm Aring and the title track itself told the world what he was still going through.
He had also moved his life, at least partially, to the United States. The medical care was there, the specialists were there. He was building a new chapter. He married Eileene Parker Smith, making a fresh start in the middle of an ongoing battle for his health. He also started the Ryan King Foundation, a charity initiative focused on providing wheelchairs, walkers, and other mobility aids to disabled individuals back in Jamaica.
The man who couldn’t walk was finding ways to help others who face the same reality. It would have been a beautiful story of resilience if the street hadn’t followed him across the water. In the early hours of Monday, July 8th, 2024, at approximately 4:30 in the morning, the NYPD’s 113 Precinct Midnight Public Safety Team pulled over a Ford Explorer at the corner of 179th Street and 114 Road in Queens, New York.
Inside that vehicle were six people. Ryan King was in the front passenger seat. His wife, Eileene Parker Smith, 41, was also inside. So were Kamore Palmer, 30, Daryl Tate, 30, Rashan Linton, 27. And the driver, Jovon Brown, 23. Cared into the NYPD, a loaded Palmetto State Armory 9mm firearm was found in the vehicle. Every person in that car was arrested.
The driver, Jovon Brown, faced additional charges, including unauthorized use of a vehicle, false impersonation, and traffic violations, including driving without a license, and improper signaling. Ryan King was slapped with five charges. Criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree for the loaded firearm.
criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree related to ammo clips, possession of an ammunition feeding device, and criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree. When the charges were filed, a six charge was added, bringing his total to six counts. He was arraigned and appeared before Queen Supreme Criminal Court on July 12th, 2024 at 9:00 a.m.
He pleaded not guilty to all charges. His bail was set at $5,000 in cash or insurance, which he posted. His attorney at the time, Mark B. Lelaykind, expressed confidence publicly that the case would ultimately be dismissed. The most serious charge he faced, criminal possession of a loaded firearm in the second degree, carries a maximum sentence of 15 years for a firsttime offender.
From the Instagram stories he posted in the days that followed, you could hear the frustration in his voice. He called out Jamaican media for covering his arrest with more energy than they had given his new album recovery which had just been released. Meanwh how can I get my album to be promoted the way how I see you guys is promoting something that you know on really know 100% about.
He said he was angry. And in that anger, you could feel the weight of a man who had survived being shot three times, who was trying to rebuild his career and his life from a wheelchair, and who now found himself tangled in a legal situation that could erase everything. The case dragged on through 2025 and into 2026. adjournments, suppression hearings, filings of compliance certificates, the legal machinery moved slowly.
On February 27th, 2026, the suppression hearing was continued and a decision reserved. His next court date was set up for March 27th, 2026 before Justice Mary Elgerano in Queen Supreme Criminal Court. His previous attorney had by that point parted ways with him, telling the Jamaica Observer that the case should have been resolved by now and expressing surprise that it was still ongoing.
But before that March 27 court date could even happen, something else hit. According to sources close to Rajin King, on Monday, March 23rd, 2026, he was just hours away from a scheduled green card interview with the United States citizenship and immigration services. That interview would have been a major step toward his permanent legal status in America, the country where he had been living, receiving medical treatment, and trying to build a future.
Hours before that appointment, officers from United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up at his residence and took him into custody. His name appeared on IC’s official detainee records. No official reason was given. Neither the artist nor his representatives issued a formal public statement.
The specific location of his detention was not disclosed. What made the situation even more complicated was the medical reality. Rian King is a paraplegic. He requires special ongoing medical attention. Placing a man in that condition into an immigration detention facility without clear communication about what he was being held for or where was a situation that alarmed not just his fans but anyone watching closely.
His former attorney, Mark Leand, told reporters he was no longer representing King, but noted that the gun case should have been settled and expressed no knowledge of the ICE situation. He was not alone in facing this. Rajin King became the third highprofile Jamaican dance hall artist to be caught up in proceedings in a short period of time.
Chronic law, the hillside artist known across Jamaica, had reportedly been held at a Florida immigration detention facility known informally as alligator Alcatraz located in Oop in the Everglades region since January 2026. Squash, whose real name is Andre Whitaker, had been briefly held by ICE the year before and later pleaded guilty to gun possession charges in Florida, receiving a sentence of 2 and 1/2 years in federal prison.
Three major names from Jamaican dance hall, three IC cases in the span of a year. The pattern was impossible to ignore and it sparked serious conversations across the dance hall fraternity about the risk Caribbean artists face when they operate in the United States without fully secured immigration status.
As of the time of writing, the full picture of what happens next for Matthew Smith remains unclear. whether his detention is directly connected to the pending Queen’s gun case, whether deportation proceedings have been initiated, whether his medical needs are being properly addressed, none of that has been publicly confirmed.
What is confirmed is that a man who built himself from the ground up in flankers, who survived being shot three times and left for dead in a gully in West Morland, who recorded albums from a wheelchair and shared his physical therapy sessions with the world, now finds himself in federal immigration custody in the country he came to for healing.
The story of Raen King is not finished, but it is a story that makes very clear how quickly the ground can shift under your feet. No matter how far you have come or how hard you have fought to get there,
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
