He was just a skinny kid from the southside, but his name hit the streets like a warning shot. Lil Jojo was not a labelmade star or an industry plant. He was a teenager with a cheap mic, a hungry crew, and a voice built for calling out ops by name. In a city where drill tracks doubled as war cries and sets used YouTube like a scoreboard, one disc record from a 16-year-old helped turn an old gang feud into Chicago’s biggest modern beef. His side repped GD.
The other side moved with F and GBE. What started as music and internet talk turned into something you could feel in the air on certain blocks. Join us as we trace how one teenager’s drill, his set, and his ops helped spark a war the city is still paying for. The conflict that framed Jojo’s whole life began long before he was even thought of.
In the early 1960s, a young leader named David, King David Barksdale, pulled different crews together on Chicago’s Southside and formed the Devil’s Disciples. That gain soon became the Black Disciples and they went to war with rivals like the Black Pea Stones over respect and territory.
In 1969, Barksdale teamed up with Larry Hoover, who led the Supreme Gangsters, and together they created the Black Gangster Disciple Nation under the Folk Nation Alliance. For a while, that super gang ran big pieces of the city’s drug trade and kept a tight hold on its members with discipline and structure. On the surface, it looked like everyone was under one flag.
Underneath, tension was growing over power, control, and who really called the shots. Everything changed in 1974. On September 2nd, Barksdale died from kidney failure, tied back to a 1968 assassination attempt, and the balance inside the BGEN fell apart. Larry Hoover had already been in prison since 1973 on a murder conviction.
And from behind bars, he shaped his side into the gangster disciples with a strict almost corporate leadership chain. The people who stayed loyal to Barksdale became the Black Disciples, moving under a looser setup built around street ministers and treating King David like a martyr. By 1989, the gangster disciples were dominating drug spots in neighborhoods like Inglewood, and the Black Disciples were tired of feeling like they were under a crew they once stood beside.
That mix of old grudges, money, and pride pushed the two branches from uneasy family into full-blown ops fighting over Southside blocks. When crack cocaine flooded Chicago in the 80s, the bloodshed climbed even higher. The gangster disciples tight organization smashed up against the black disciples smaller dynasties and every corner with buyers could turn into a hot zone.
A truce in 1978 led by black disciples figure Michael Mickey Bull Johnson slowed things down for a while. But when he went to prison in 1986, the piece crumbled. In 1991, Mickey Bull himself was gunned down in Englewood reportedly by gangster disciples. The next day, Black Disciples members hit it back and killed three people tied to the gangster Disciples.
Between 1991 and 1995, Chicago saw more than 200 gang-lated murders. One of the darkest moments came in 1994 when 11-year-old Black Disciples member Robert Yummy Sander was sent on a drive by aimed at gangster disciples and instead killed 14-year-old Shavendine in Roseand. Afraid he would snitch, older Black Disciples ordered Derek Hardaway, 14, and Craig Hardaway, 16, to take him under a vioaduct and execute him.
The war was now chewing up kids and spitting them out. And the southside streets Jojo would grow up on were already soaked in that history. Out of that kind of pressure, a new sound started to take shape. In the early 2010s, drill music came out of Chicago Southside, built on grim beats and blunt lyrics that matched the reality around it.
Drill was a branch of trap and gangster rap, but it was even more direct. The rappers were usually teenagers, often tied into sets like The Gangster Disciples or Black Disciples, and they wrapped in an ominous, confrontational way about gang rivalries and real incidents, sometimes straight up murder. Early on, drillers did not care much for fancy wordplay.
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Chief Keef made that clear when he said, “I know what I’m doing. I mastered it, and I don’t even really use metaphors or punchlines cuz I don’t have to, but I could. I think that’s doing too much. I’d rather just say what’s going on right now. I don’t really like metaphors or punchlines like that. On these blocks, people were not looking for poetry.
They wanted someone to say exactly what life felt like when every walk outside could end with shots. On the streets, drill already meant to fight or retaliate. And it could stretch from getting ready for a night out to allout war with your ops. DRRO city rapper Pac-Man is credited as one of the first to lock that word into the local sound with his 2010 track it’s a drill tying the slang to the music in a clear way.
As the subg genre grew, drill rappers used early social media as a tool and a weapon. Musician Nledge said they understood virality in a way people did not give them credit for, turning cheap videos and simple uploads into big audiences. They dropped clips on YouTube, wrapped in their own neighborhoods, and let their sets and rivals be the background of the visuals.
Drake later pointed to the drill wave as a major engine behind Chicago hip hop’s rise in the early 2010s, calling it a grassroots movement that lived in a tight loop between the streets, schools, parties, and online feeds. In that loop, diss tracks and real beef sat side by side.
As drill grew, it was wrapped up in a wider crisis. Drill rappers had long been linked to legal battles, prison time, and tragic early deaths. While the subg genre gained momentum, Chicago faced a heavy spike in homicides driven mostly by gang violence concentrated on the south side. With drill used as slang for kill, the music and its artists often reflected the crime heavy reality they were stuck in.
For many people watching from outside the city, drill sounded like the soundtrack to that bloodshed. For people living inside it, the music and the murders were part of the same story. Rappers like Chief Keefe, King Vaughn, and Lil Durk became central to the movement. and for some symbols of his darkest side, bringing gritty street life into their hardcore rhymes and sending that reality out to the rest of the world.
Right in the middle of this history, on April 6th, 1994, a boy named Joseph J. Coleman was born in Chicago. He grew up around 69th and Parnell Avenue on the south side in the same kind of neighborhoods that had already seen years of gangster disciples and black disciples beef. His mother, Robin, raised him after his father was sent to prison on a 13-year sentence for attempted murder.
his name never shared with the public. With no father at home, Jojo grew closer to his half-brother, John, who was only a few months older than him, and to his sister, whose age has not been revealed. There are no details about his schooling, but the streets were their own lesson book. In that environment, the line between the neighborhood and the gang was thin.
At some point, Joseph was brought into a local faction of the gangster disciples, a membership later confirmed by Chicago law enforcement. To outsiders, that made him another number tied to a prison gang. To him, it meant a set, older homies, and a banner to stand under in a city built on sides.
The lack of real guidance helped pull him deeper into gang activity and into the cycle of violence already spinning through his community. Even then, he was described as someone who did not sell drugs, a small line that set him apart from some of his own crew. During his teens, he started rapping under the name Lil Jojo, making drill tracks in the same style that was taking over Chicago.
According to his brother Swag Diero, he began rapping as a response to a Lil Durk song that mocked and threatened the Gangster Disciples. From the start, his music was not just about flexing. It was about gang pride and gang beef. Drill became the way he clapped back at his ops, put the gangster disciples side of the story on record, and stepped directly into the lane of only the family aka, the Chicago group and label built around rappers like Lil Durk and the late King Vaughn, setting the stage for the young 16-year-old to help start one of the
city’s biggest and deadliest feuds. By 2012, Drill was not just some local sound on the Southside anymore. It was starting to run the whole Chicago rap conversation. Pioneering names like Chief Keef, Lil Durk, Lil Reese, Fredo Santana, G Herbo, Lil Bby, King Louie, FBG Duck, and producer Young Chop were pulling millions of views, turning block stories into content the whole internet wanted to see.
At the same time, another wave of young drillers like Lil Jojo, S Dot, Eye, La Capone, Rondo Number Nine, Lil Mr. SD and producers like Smileys and Leaky Leak were doubling down on that energy, dragging their sets and their street beef right into the booth. Drill was becoming the soundtrack to a city where gang signs, funerals, and court dates were already a regular part of life, and every track made it easier for fans and enemies to see who was claiming what.
In that same hot summer, Joseph Coleman moved from being just another young face in the crowd to someone the whole drill scene had to pay attention to. under the name Lil Jojo. He self-released a track on YouTube called Three Honey K in August 2012, taking direct aim at Chief Keep’s song Three Hana. In the drill world, that extra K was not a joke.
Chicago police were already watching the new wave of drill videos, and they clocked very quickly that this kind of trading diss tracks was turning up the tension between sets that already hated each other. As three Honey K started to circulate, Jojo’s name turned into something bigger than one song.
During the feud, he rose into a leadership role in a new sector of the Gangster Disciples that people on the southside knew as Brick Squad or Brick Squad 069. That set sat on the other side of the warline from Black Disciples claiming 300 and Jojo became one of the loudest voices for his side both in his music and online.
September 2012 turned into a month where timelines and comment sections looked like digital war zones. Jojo’s Camp and rival members of other sets went back and forth on Twitter, throwing insults and death threats out in the open, tagging each other and making sure everyone knew who they were riding with. Among all that online smoke, a lot of what Jojo put out was aimed straight at Chief Keith’s camp, keeping that beef front and center for fans and enemies who were watching every tweet.
On the day everything went too far, Jojo and some of his people decided not to just talk on the internet. They got into a car and headed over to Parkway Garden Homes, a lowincome complex on the south side that sat near where Chief Keef was living. As they drove, they recorded themselves making sure the camera caught them laughing, talking heavy, and taunting Chief Keep’s click on their own turf.
Outside, rapper Lil Ree was out near his house with his companions when the car rolled through. What followed was not just music. From the safety of the vehicle, Jojo and the other passengers traded raw, deres of remarks with the crew on the street, pushing the same disrespect that had been in the records right into face-to-f face contact.
The standoff ended with Lil Ree snapping and yelling, “Joe, I’m going to kill you.” A line that sounded like standard street talk until you see what happened later that night. After that tense encounter in Parkway Gardens, Jojo did not fall back into the shadows. Instead, he went right back to social media where drill beefs often got decided long before the first shot was fired. At 6:13 p.m.
, he jumped on Twitter and posted that he was on the 6,900 block of South Princeton Avenue on the south side. For anyone in the city who wanted to find him, that tweet was like dropping a pin. It came not long after he had already put up the music video for 300k on YouTube. A video where he and his squad flaunted guns, threw up gang signs, and pushed the BDK message that mocked the Black Disciples and their 300 identity.
On the track, Jojo kept shouting BDK, a shorthand that stood for Black Disciple Killer, and used the record to taunt rival BDS tied to the so-called 300 squad. It was not subliminal. It was not coded. It was a straightup disrespect record from a gangster disciple baby face aimed right at his ops main anthem. Now, the words, the video, and his real-time location were all out there together.
And in a city in the middle of a gang war, putting that mix into the open was risky. Police reports say that at around 7:30 p.m. about a little over an hour after his tweet, Jojo was on the street at 70th and Princeton Avenue riding on the pegs of a friend’s bicycle. A sedan rolled up and shots came from the driver’s seat, turning that regular southside block into the last place Jojo would ever see.
Private video surveillance from a nearby house caught the attack. In the footage, Jojo is visible on the back of the bike riding with his friend before the shots ring out and he tries to take off northbound on Princeton. He does not get far. He collapses on the sidewalk while the other person on the bike sprints off in the opposite direction.
Never identified by police. Officers later found six 9mm shell casings at the scene. Hard metal proof of how fast a Twitter post and a diss track can turn into real smoke. Jojo was rushed to University of Chicago medicine comr children’s hospital, but the damage was already done and by 9:03 p.m. he was pronounced dead.
The killing of Joseph Coleman did not disappear into the long list of southside shootings that never make the news. it hit different. Coleman was 18, a small but rising name in the drill scene, and he had just released a track that called out one of the city’s biggest new stars, and the gang tied to him. His death was quickly framed as a landmark moment in Chicago’s growing gang violence crisis.
A case that made even people outside the neighborhoods pay attention to how deep the problems had become. His murder came in a period where feuds between rival sets were already heating up and police and residents saw how this one drive by seemed to push the gangster disciples and black disciples conflict into an even uglier phase.
Despite all the media buzz despite all the talk about Twitter disc songs and 300 law enforcement did not manage to arrest anyone for the murder and the case stayed open. Another file in a stack of unsolved street hits the internet did not go quiet after Jojo’s body hit the ground. Chicago police started digging into social media trying to see if any of the online flexing would turn into real proof.
At first, they publicly floated the idea that Chief Keefe, Lil Ree, or Lil Durk might have had some kind of involvement, not as a solved case, but as names in a pool of people with clear motives and public beef with the victim. Officers checked Chief Keep’s Twitter where a few hours after the shooting, a message appeared that read, “Haha, it’s sad cuz Jojo wanted to be just like us. # LMAO.
” In another version of the same line, he wrote, “It’s sad cause that Jojo wanted to be just like us. #lmao.” To people who had just watched clips of Jojo pulling up on Lil Reese and calling out the 300 crew, that tweet felt like more than a random joke. It read like mockery of a dead op and it pushed both fans and police to look harder at the connection between the chart climbing star and the teenager who had just been killed.
The backlash to those tweets was fast. Chief Keef started getting dragged across social media for laughing at someone who had just been murdered in a driveby and critics and fans accused him of being tied to the killing itself. Under all that pressure, he tried to walk it back. He claimed his Twitter account had been hacked and that the disrespectful message was not really from him.
Later, as the news coverage spread, he posted a longer message that sounded a lot more careful, saying, “Man, been thinking about this Chicago street [ __ ] a lot. My prayers go out to Jojo’s family on their loss. I didn’t know him, but he young just like me. I can assure everyone that I had nothing to do with this tragedy, though. My Twitter act was hacked.
To the police and to Jojo’s people, that sudden switch from laughing to sending prayers and blaming a hacker did not erase the original insult. It just created another layer of doubt around whether the tweet showed how he really felt about an enemy who had been spinning BDK against his crew. For Robin Russell, Jojo’s mother, that doubt was not something she could leave alone.
She sat down in 2012 for an interview on the BET show Don’t Sleep with TJ Holmes and said out loud what many in her son’s circle were already whispering. She pointed the finger at Chief Keef and said, “Chief Keef is responsible. I don’t believe himself pulled the trigger, but I believe he paid somebody to do it.” In the same interview, she spoke about wanting justice and about hoping her son’s case could show kids there was a better path than chasing clout in the streets instead of focusing on school.
At the same time, she admitted she feared for her own life, saying that police had a couple of leads and were still working the case. But that did not stop her from saying she did not buy the story that Ke’s Twitter had been hacked. To a grieving mother, watching her son turned into a meme and a talking point, the idea that someone could mock his death online and then shrug it off as a glitch felt like another slap in the face.
Even with all of that pressure, the Chicago Police Department never brought official charges against Chief Keef, Lil Ree, or Lil Durk for Jojo’s murder. They kept his name in press conferences, but nothing hard enough surfaced to put anyone from that camp in front of the jury. As the months went by, another name floated around in reports and on the streets.
Detectives began to suspect that a 26-year-old Black Disciples member named Keith Kiki Bonds might have been the one who actually pulled the trigger on Jojo. That theory never made it all the way into a courtroom either, partly because Bonds himself was shot and killed on September 17th, 2012, less than 2 weeks after Jojo’s murder.
In 2013, Jojo’s older brother sent out a tweet that read, “Even the ops knowf who took my bro ain’t walking this earth no more.” A line that suggested everyone in the neighborhood already knew the shooter was dead. While all of this was playing out, bigger names in rap like 50 Cent and Waka Flock of Flame also weighed in, telling people not to use Chief Keef as an easy scapegoat for a killing in a city already drowning in gang violence.
If Jojo’s murder showed how fast things could go left on a random block, his funeral showed how wild the energy around his name had become. Hundreds of people turned up at Joan’s funeral home and at a southwestside funeral home to say goodbye to the teenager. Some coming as family, some as friends, and a lot as fans and gang associates.
Inside, as music played and people moved toward the front, a group of teens surged forward, trying to get one last close look at the body in the white casket. The push was so strong they nearly toppled the casket. And in that moment, grief turned into rage. A family member grabbed a microphone and shouted that everyone was being disrespectful.
And Jojo’s mother, Robin Russell, finally snapped and told the crowd to get the f out. Police had to step in and clear the room, turning what was supposed to be a homegoing into another scene of chaos. Outside, the grief shifted back into drill culture. Young men and women in shirts printed with RIP Jojo and his face gathered in the parking lot dancing around cars while three Hanukkeay blasted from speakers wrapping along to the same disc record that had taunted the black disciples.
Then came reports of gunfire outside the funeral home with no one sure if the shots were meant as a salute or a scare and officers were sent toward Morgan Park and nearby areas to stop the tension from spilling into something even worse. The trouble did not stop once the body left the funeral home. The procession headed toward Mount Hope Cemetery, the same graveyard where so many young gang members had already been buried with reports of as many as 100 cars in the line.
Some riders flashing gang signs and even guns out of the windows. Police already on high alert raced ahead of the vehicles and paused the procession after a tip that someone in the caravan had fired a shot in the air. At the cemetery, officers drew their weapons on an SUV when they thought there might be guns inside, but ended up finding nothing.
Later, at a separate location, they stopped another car tied to someone who had attended the funeral and did recover a handgun, leading to an arrest after lining up around 30 people and searching them. Residents living near Mount Hope in workingclass neighborhoods where many police and city workers stayed said they had been dealing with this kind of gang funeral chaos for a while.
Community members like Kathleen Walsh and Tony Bansley started keeping track of these processions, counting close to 100 gang related Cortez a year with reports of reckless driving, shots fired, and loaded weapons discovered. For them, Jojo’s funeral was not just about one dead rapper. It was another sign that the gang wars were now spilling into every part of public life.
Inside Jojo’s wake, the anger was not aimed only at the kids in the crowd. One of his cousins, Charles Swift, took the mic and went after the music industry itself. He told the room that record companies were coming into Chicago and promising teenagers they would be superstars without giving them any real guidance or artist development.
The crowd applauded as he said that labels were helping sell a false dream. At the same time, Chicago writers and activists were calling out the way big companies had chased the drill wave. Chief Keef had signed a deal reported at around $3 million with Interscope, including his own GBE, Glory Boys Entertainment Imprint.
Liil Reese and Lil Durk had their own major label situations and their music was filled with gang references that matched the lives they were living as black disciples from Englewood. Community voices like Wallace Gator Bradley argued that those labels were feeding off an aura of violence using images of guns, sets, and dead ops to sell records while leaving whole neighborhoods to deal with the real body count.
to Jojo’s family watching their son laid out while kids outside wrapped along to BDK. It felt like the same system that had boosted Chief Keef and F GBE was now leaving Brick Squad and Jojo World with nothing but grief. The story did not end with Jojo’s burial. In December 2012, another teenager tied to that same scene paid with his life for keeping Jojo’s name alive.
Joshua Davis, an 18-year-old rapper known as Jay Loud, was shot to death on Christmas Day on the 2000 block of West 69th Street, just a few blocks from his home. According to his brother, Ricky Davis, Jay Loud had gotten into a fight with several men on a CTA bus, and when he stepped off, they followed him.
One of them pulled a handgun and shot him several times in the torso and once in the ear. For his family, the motive was simple and sickening. Ricky said his brother was wearing a Jojo World hooded sweatshirt honoring his slain friend Joseph Coleman and that he believed that hoodie got him killed, saying he’s gone because of a freaking hoodie.
That ain’t right. On his Twitter, Jay Loud had paid homage to Brick Squad, sharing the same name as an Atlanta rap crew, but in Chicago tied to the gangster disciple set police linked to Jojo. In his own videos, Joud wrapped lines like, “Catch a op, I’mma let him have it.” sending the same aggressive message that had made Jojo both popular and a target.
Ricky said his little brother just wanted to smoke weed, rap, and get rich, and dreamed of making enough money to take care of their mother, a single mom of five. Instead, he ended up another name on the long list of young men caught in the crossfire of a rap beef that blurred into real gang war. Outside of Englewood, in the blocks where all this started, people were watching the drama through screens and speakers.
Chicago media and national outlets covered the story as part of a bigger wave of concern about drill and what some writers called trap rap in the city. Producers like Daines, who shot Chief Keef’s I Don’t Like video, pointed out that this new subgenre was darker and more graphic than older gangster rap with kids like Lil Mouse barely in their teens rapping about guns and murder.
Writers such as Alexander Frer and others said the music was a harsh mirror of lowincome neighborhoods that most of Chicago pretended not to see. Industry people like Kevin Hall and Jason Jer Evans argued that while they might not like the message, it was understandable that teenagers growing up where Jojo did felt they needed guns and gangs to survive.
Even if labels and producers were pushing them to perform that image for money. At the same time, clinical voices added that in places where violence is normal, kids can grow up believing there is no other option, using aggression as the only way to feel power or respect. In the middle of all that commentary, OTFGBE was held up as the latest face of this trap and drill wave with Chief Keef and his crew telling their own stories of life around Parkway Gardens while their rivals in Brick Squad and Jojo World tried to do the same from their side of
the tracks. Behind the headlines about tweets and funerals, the people Jojo named in his music had their own deep ties to the streets. Liil Ree, born Tavverus Lamont Taylor, grew up in the Englewood neighborhood in a 16-story high-rise known as the Calumet Buildings, and he was around the Black Disciples from the time he was a child.
By his pre-teen years, after moving to 64th in Normal, he was already affiliated with the gang and had become close friends with Lil Durk, another BD member from the same area. Reese picked up legal cases young, catching a burglary charge in May 2010 and getting two years of probation and later facing charges for criminal trespass, battery, and mob action, plus a viral clip that allegedly showed him assaulting a woman.
Liil Durk, born Durk Devonte Banks, also came out of Englewood with his father incarcerated when he was just 7 months old. He remembered times when there was not enough food in the house, and he started building his presence on platforms like MySpace and YouTube, learning how to use social media long before drill blew up. Durk took rap more seriously after becoming a father at 17.
But he also joined the Black Disciples and got caught with gun charges, including possession of a firearm with a defaced serial number, eventually pleading guilty to a reduced charge of aggravated unauthorized use of a weapon. In 2010, he formed Only the Family, a collective that would later include names like King Vaughn, Fusky, Duty Low, Book of 600, F D-Day, and F Booni Mo, turning his BD ties in Englewood Story into a label and a movement.
When Dirk dropped L’s Anthem and dissed Jojo’s affiliates, and Jojo came back with BDK, 300K, attacking Keef, Reese, and Durk, it was not just rapclout on the line. It was the pride of whole sets that already had blood in the dirt. Chief Keef, born Keith Pharaoh Kart, was the one who ended up as the poster boy for this whole storm.
Raised at Parkway Garden Homes in the Washington Park area on the south side, a stronghold of the Black Disciples, he grew up immersed in that culture with the sociologist later saying the gang was central to who he was. His mother was young. His father was out of the picture when he was about a year old.
And his grandmother, Margaret Carter, a school bus driver, became his legal guardian. Keef started rapping as a little kid using his mom’s karaoke machine. And by his early teens, he was dropping mixtapz and building a local buzz. The legal system knew his name early, too, with juvenile charges for heroin manufacturer and distribution.
a chase where he pointed a handgun at police and was hit with multiple counts of aggravated assault with a firearm and spells in juvenile detention and on house arrest. In 2012, while still in his mid- teens, he was at the center of a bidding war between labels with companies like Young Jeezy CTE World trying to sign him.
His mixtape, Back from the Dead, produced a single I don’t like featuring Lil Ree, which went from a neighborhood hit to a Billboard chart record once Kanye West did a remix. He followed up with Love Sosa and both songs anchored his debut album Finally Rich. In interviews and videos, he often referred to himself as Sosa, a nod to Scarface drug kingpin Alejandro Sosa and to his crew as Glow Gang.
People in his circle like Ballout called him a rhyming machine and a music genius, even joking that he was like a black Justin Bieber. For many, he came to stand in for the whole Churock image. the face of the city where a teenager could rap about gang life, carry guns, and still end up signed to a major label, and living between courtrooms and studios.
As Chief Kee’s career climbed, his legal problems kept stacking up, and Jojo’s murder followed him like a shadow. He had already done time under house arrest and in juvenile detention for weapon cases, and 2012 and 2013 brought more heat. After the September 4th shooting, Chicago police said they were investigating his possible connection to the death of Joseph Coleman.
At the same time, prosecutors were pushing him back into court for parole violations, including a video interview at a gun range where he fired a weapon on camera, which they said broke the terms of his probation. Pitchfork was ordered to hand over that footage, and Keef bounced between court dates, juvenile detention, house arrests, and later arrests for probation violations, marijuana charges, speeding at 110 mph in a 55 mph zone, and missing shows he had been paid to appear at.
He was sued for tens of thousands of dollars by promoters. Evicted from a Highland Park home and picked up more drug and driving cases. Jojo’s killing and the beef behind it sparked more than gossip. It set off a bigger debate in Chicago about drill gangs and the role of the industry. The city was already dealing with a reported 38% spike in homicides, much of it tied to gang violence on the south side.
When the story of a teenager murdered after taunting rival rappers on video hit national outlets, some Chicago officials and activists said record labels and radio stations were pouring gasoline on a fire by pushing music that glamorized beef, guns, and retaliation. In one article, Kart was called the prince of violent Chicago rap with his gun charge treated almost like a badge of authenticity by people trying to sell his records.
Former gangster disciple Wallace Gator Bradley argued that labels wanted the aura of violence that young rappers created in their videos because it sold a raw and dangerous image to fans far away from places like Englewood. Others pointed out that tracks like Jay-Z and Kanye West Murder to Excellence, which condemned violence, did not get the same push on radio, while songs that sounded like real threats did.
At the same time, some industry voices said drill artists should not be attacked for simply telling the truth about their neighborhoods, especially when those stories showed how hard life was in the projects and housing complexes that much of the city ignored. While adults argued over who to blame, the younger generation answered in the way they knew best through more music.
After Jojo’s death, one of his associates, Lil J #00, released a grim remix to a 300k that made it clear the beef was not over. The track mentioned Lil Ree by name and warned that Lilo Reese going to die tonight, accusing others of setting up the murder and promising revenge in the same casual but deadly tone that had defined the original BDK record.
Chicago police and city leaders watched these videos go up and worried that the next shooting might already be coded in the lyrics. Superintendent Gary McCarthy said the back and forth on social media and in raps was part of the problem, calling it tit for tat and saying that taunting people with thinly veiled threats online was a dangerous game.
But to kids on those blocks, putting those words on a beat was how you show loyalty to your set and kept your fallen homies names alive, even if it meant dragging the whole city deeper into a spiral where every verse could be seen as a death wish. Around this time, writers and experts looking at Chicago’s music and murder numbers tried to explain why drill and trap rap hit so hard.
Some said the songs were just a surface level performance of anger, but others argued they were real reports from teenagers stuck in places with no jobs, bad schools, and constant violence. Clinical voices pointed out that in neighborhoods where everyone seems armed and quick to fight, kids often see violence as a way to feel powerful or stay alive, and that if all you see as success are rappers waving guns in million view videos, it is easy to think that is the only route out.
Industry insiders admitted that many of the people making money from the music were older executives, often far removed from the streets, who used these teenagers and their stories as a product. In the middle of all that, Chief Keef, Lil Durk, Lil Ree, Brick Squad, Jojo World, and GBE kept dropping tracks and clips where gang names, dead rivals, and real corners were part of the hook.
This was set life filmed in high definition with every disc and every death turning into content. By the end of 2012, community leaders were still demanding some kind of balance between letting young artists tell their truth and not turning that same truth into a marketing plan. Through it all, Liil Jojo’s name stayed in the middle of the conversation.
By the time the world heard about Lil Jojo’s murder, his brother Swag Dairo had already lived through the worst phone call of his life. In an interview, he explained that the day started out regular. He and Jojo had been together earlier, moving around like they always did, just two brothers locked in the same grind.
When they split up, Jojo told him he was going to shoot dice, something he did all the time on the block. Swag went off to handle his own plans, not thinking that this was the last time he would see his little brother alive. Then his phone died. For a while, he was just out there with no connection, not knowing the city had just flipped into crisis around Jojo’s name.
When he finally charged it and turned it back on, his screen lit up with missed calls from family members, including his grandmother, and that was the first sign that something was really wrong. When Swag finally picked up, he got hit with the news straight to his face. On the other end of the line, they told him his brother had been shot.
He described that moment as shocking and unreal, like his head could not catch up with what his ears were hearing. Jojo was not just his little brother. In Swag’s words, he was one of his biggest influences, the person he looked up to, the one who pushed him and inspired him. Hearing that someone like that might be gone, did not make sense at first.
He rushed toward the hospital, thinking his brother might still be alive, trying to hold on to the hope that this was just another scare and Jojo would pull through. On top of that, he used the interview to shut down a rumor that had been running through the streets and the blogs.
Swag said clearly that Jojo was not on a bike when he got shot. According to him, his brother was on foot when it happened. And that correction mattered to him because he wanted people to know the truth about how Jojo’s last moments really looked. The reality did not hit Swag all at once. It hit harder when the hospital part was over and they took him to the morg.
He had to identify his brother not as a rapper or a driller or a name in a beef, but as a body. He said the whole process felt surreal and heavy. That cold moment in the morg marked the start of Swag’s real spiral. He talked about how everything he thought his life was going to be started to fall apart from. There, Jojo’s death did not just break his heart, it shook his path.
In that same conversation, Swag opened up about what happened to him after Jojo was killed. Instead of going to college like he once planned, he ended up getting locked up. He even said he got arrested at Jojo’s own funeral, showing how deep into chaos he had fallen while he was still trying to process the loss.
For him, that day in the morg was not the end of the story. It was the opening to a long stretch where pain, anger, and bad decisions kept piling up. The little brother he looked up to was gone. The streets felt even more dangerous, and every move seemed to pull him further away from the future he had imagined and deeper into the same world that had just taken Jojo’s life.
By the end of that year, it was clear that Jojo’s death did not only affect his family, it intensified what was already a volatile drill scene. After he was killed, people all over Chicago and beyond started arguing about what this new sound was really doing to kids. There were debates about whether drill was just telling the truth about life in the hood or whether it was pushing young kids to double down on that life.
There were also questions about how social media helped fuel all of it, letting gang members clown their ops online before, during, and after real shootings, using tweets and videos like weapons. Even after he was gone, Jojo’s name kept being pulled into new spaces. In 2013, a documentary style theater piece called Crime Scene, a Chicago anthology used his story to shine a light on violence against black communities in the city.
Actor Scott Batty Jr. played Coleman on stage, while behind him, a huge screen showed Jojo’s real tweets as his murder was reenacted in front of the audience. It was like the same post that once marked him as a target in the streets were now being used to teach people what was happening to kids like him.
Years later, in 2024, he was honored again during a concert at Chicago’s United Center, where he and several other slain Chicago rappers were remembered. That tribute showed how Jojo had become more than a local name. His face and his music turned into a symbol of a generation of drill rappers who did not live long enough to grow old with their fame.
The love did not stop at murals and memorials. On top of the emotional legacy, Jojo also left behind something most kids from his hood never get, a catalog that still earns. According to sources, his net worth has been listed as up to $1 million. Likely because his tracks and mixtapz are still being streamed and played long after his death.
Even from the grave, his voice keeps bringing in money. It is a twisted kind of success story because the same tracks that helped turn him into a name are tied to the beef that cost him his life. For fans, it is proof of how powerful his impact was. For his family and the people who loved him, it is a reminder that he had real potential to win in music without ending up on a sidewalk under police lights.
The streets did not stop moving because Jojo did. And while his people tried to pick up the pieces, the main rapper tied to the other side of the beef kept going, but never fully escaped trouble. Years after the murder and the Twitter controversy, Chief Kee’s name was still in legal files with an arrest in January 2017 for allegedly beating and robbing producer Ramsay Thrate, who said Kee pointed firearms at him and took his Rolex.
Another arrest in June 2017 in South Dakota for smoking cannabis, and a nocontest plea in April 2019 that ended with a suspended sentence and one more mark on a record. Lil Durk’s path after Jojo’s death was as messy. In May 2019, he and King Vaughn were arrested over a February 5th shooting and robbery in Atlanta, where prosecutors said they robbed and shot a man, taking a Jeep Cherokee, and around $30,000, then spent weeks locked up before bonding out on bonds set at $250,000 for Durk and $300,000 for Vond.
In October 2022, the charges against Durk in that case were dismissed. But on October 9th, 2024, a wrongful death lawsuit hit him. the estate of King Vaughn and F records filed by the family of Carlton FBG Duck Weekly, who had been murdered outside a Gold Coast strip mall on August 4th, 2020.
With the suit saying Durk and his F imprint were profiting off Weekley’s death through negligence and misconduct, less than 2 weeks later, on October 23rd, 2024, federal agents arrested five men tied to Durk’s only the family camp and indicted them on conspiracy to commit murder for hire. murder for hire involving a death and using a machine gun in a violent crime.
All linked to an August 2022 shooting that targeted Quando Rondo and killed his cousin, Savia Lul Pab Robinson. And prosecutors said flights and rental cars for those five men were paid with a credit card tied to the label. The next day on October 24th, 2024, Liil Durk himself was arrested in Broward County, Florida by US Marshalss with prosecutors saying he hired those men, offering money and lucrative music opportunities to anyone who would murder Quando Rondo.
And he was extradited to Los Angeles, locked up at MDC Los Angeles, pleaded not guilty, and was held without bail, while some legal voices said he could face life in prison if convicted or even the death penalty. During a detention hearing on December 12th, unsealed documents linked him to a second alleged murder for higher situation involving the 2022 killing of Stefan Mack, who was shot after leaving the Youth Peace Center of Roseland in Chicago.
And though he was not charged in that case, prosecutors used those files to argue he was a flight risk. So when his team put $3 million on the table for bail, the judge said no. His trial, first set for January 7th, 2025, was pushed back and moved into January 2026 as evidence, plea talks, and other complications came up.
And in the middle of that, in February 2025, Andrea Robinson, the mother of Lil Pab, filed a wrongful death suit against him. While by early June 2025, federal prosecutors confirmed they would not seek the death penalty. And by late 2025, the trial had been postponed yet again. Liil Reese’s later years show the same pattern of chaos that sticks to names tied to this beef.
On June 23rd, 2013, he was arrested in Chicago and charged with motor vehicle theft after an April incident where he could not prove that a BMW 750 Lee was his. And though that charge was later dropped, he did not stay clear because on July 13, 2013, he was arrested again for marijuana possession.
Years later, in May 2022, he caught a more serious case in Houston, Texas, when he was arrested for aggravated assault of a family member, sat in Harris County Jail, and was not released until January 12th, 2023 after serving 7 months, and on October 16th, 2024. That aggravated assault case ended with a sentence of 5 years in prison.
While individual rappers were catching their own cases, the larger war between GDs and BDs was getting treated like a full-scale criminal enterprise. Federal RICO statutes started hitting both sides. In 2016, a massive case went after the Gangster Disciples, bringing charges against 32 members, including figures like Frank Smith and Warren Griffin.
They were tied to 10 murders and serious drug trafficking. And by 2023, some of them had been handed life sentences. In 2020, another big bus went after the Black Disciples with 23 members, including leader Darnell Murder McMiller, facing drug and gun charges. In 2024, six BD members linked to Oblak were convicted for the murder of FBG Duck, another Chicago rapper whose death shook the city.
Then in 2025, a case focusing on Spanish gangster disciples led to three members being indicted for murders and arson from 2020. Local police had their own strategies, too. Back in 2016, Chicago police used something called a strategic subject list to try to predict who would be involved in violence. Using that, they arrested around 140 gang members, including affiliates of both GD and BD sets and seized 23 guns and about $45,000 worth of drugs.
Supporters said they were trying to get the most high-risisk people off the streets before more shootings happened. Critics argued that none of it was fixing the root problems, poverty, segregation, lack of opportunity, and resources that fed the gangs in the first place. Even with big sweeps, courtroom wins, plays, and tribute shows, the deeper damage from the GD versus BD war kept showing up in the numbers and on the map.
Between 2018 and 2020, around 63% of Chicago’s homicides hit just 15 African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods, laying out a safety gap that connected violence to years of disinvestment and neglect. On the BD side, annual events on May 24th, the birthday of David Barksdale kept his name and legacy alive.
On the GD side, loyalty to Larry Hoover stayed strong. Between memorial days, tribute shirts, F chains, Brick Squad tags, and Jojo World hoodies. The feud did not just live in tracks. It lived in rituals, anniversaries, and the way people talked about their dead homies. In a lot of hoods, people do not trust the system, so they keep their own scoreboard and talk about bodies like debts that have to get paid back.
When you look at what happened to Lil Jojo’s family, to his ops, and to both sides of this war, it is clear that nobody walked away clean. So now you tell me, when the music stops, who really wins in a story like this? Is it the labels, the sets, the fans, or does everybody lose when a 16-year-old can start a war that never really ends? Let us know what you think in the comments box below.
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
