It’s 4:26 in the afternoon on August 4th, 2020 on Oak Street in Chicago’s Gold Coast and everything feels normal. Until two cars suddenly tear down the narrow roadway with engines roaring, shattering the calm and replacing it with instant chaos. Before anyone can even process what’s happening, the men inside are already out, guns a-blazing, shooting Carlton Daequan Weekly Williams, the man the world knows as FBG Duck 16 times.
People scatter immediately, running in every direction as panic takes over while surveillance cameras capture the entire scene in cold, unforgiving detail. Duck is rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, but the damage is already too severe. A short time later, he’s pronounced dead. And Chicago, a city no stranger to street violence, is left stunned because for years most of these killings had stayed confined to the same South Side hotbeds, places like Englewood, Parkway Gardens, O Block, and STL/EBT territories where this cycle of
retaliation had long been concentrated. So when the shooting erupted on Oak Street, a strip known more for designer stores, luxury shopping, and tourists than gunfire, it hit differently because the war wasn’t supposed to reach this far. But it did. It followed FBG Duck all the way from the South Side into the richest shopping district in the state.
And now the real question isn’t just who pulled the trigger, but how it all began, how it spread, and how it ended up consuming everyone it ever touched. To understand what happened on Oak Street that afternoon, you have to go back. Not to 2020, not even to 2011 when the names that would define this war were first carved into brick walls.
You have to go back to 1958 to a group of teenagers in Hyde Park, Englewood, and Kenwood on Chicago’s South Side who looked around at the block they lived on and decided the only way to survive it was to band together. They called themselves the Devil’s Disciples and the name fit the times. Chicago in the late 1950s was a city in racial and economic upheaval with black families hemmed into redlined neighborhoods that the government had systematically stripped of investment and the streets filling up with young
men who had no institutions willing to claim them and no economy willing to employ them. The Devil’s Disciples were not at first a criminal organization in the formal sense. They were a protection alliance, a response to a specific and documented reality, which is that if nobody was going to protect you, you protected yourself.
By 1961, a teenager named David Barksdale had taken sole control of the organization. His vision was expansive. He did not want just a street corner. He wanted an institution, something that could absorb the smaller neighborhood clicks scattered across the South Side and give them a unified identity.
He called it the Black Disciples Nation and within a few years, recruitment had swelled into the thousands. Barksdale was charismatic in the way that certain figures are charismatic because they understand that power comes from narrative, from giving people a story to believe in about themselves.
His people believed in him the way communities believe in anyone who promises to make them visible in a world that keeps trying to render them invisible. Meanwhile, on a different corner of that same South Side, a man named Larry Hoover was building something parallel. Hoover’s outfit was called the Supreme Gangsters and while he and Barksdale ran separate operations, the logic of their environments pointed them toward the same conclusion, that consolidation was survival.
In 1968, they merged their organizations into what became the Black Gangster Disciple Nation, one of the largest street organizations Chicago had ever produced. The alliance was born out of practicality, but it carried within it a fundamental tension because Barksdale and Hoover were not the same kind of leader, did not want the same kind of thing, and had built their respective followings around different values and different loyalties.
That tension would prove fatal to the union. Soon after the merger, Hoover was charged and convicted for murder and received a sentence that essentially removed him from the streets. Barksdale was shot in 1968 and never fully recovered. He died of kidney failure in 1974 at 27 years old, leaving behind an organization that was simultaneously enormous and leaderless.
What followed was inevitable. Without the two founders to hold it together, the Black Gangster Disciple Nation fractured along the fault lines that had always been there. Hoover’s faction became the Gangster Disciples. Barksdale’s faction reasserted its autonomy as the Black Disciples. Two organizations born from the same union now standing on opposite sides of a line that would produce decades of bloodshed.
The DEA would later document this split in a formal assessment, noting that after the Black Disciples broke from the Gangster Disciples around 1972, a violent territorial dispute began between the two gangs that continued to the present day. That document was written in 2017, nearly 50 years after the split, the violence was still ongoing.
The 1978 Folk Nation Alliance tried to put some order on the chaos. The Gangster Disciples anchored the folk side while rival organizations consolidated under the People Nation. And for a period, the formal alliance structure imposed a kind of bureaucratic peace, at least inside the prisons where it was mostly enforced.
On the streets, the reality was murkier. Blocks that had GD sets and BD sets existed within blocks of each other, sometimes within the same building. And then in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the government began tearing down Chicago’s public housing projects, scattering entire communities into new neighborhoods with no preparation, no support, and no peace.
The project demolitions did not end gang culture. They fractured its geography so thoroughly that old alliances became meaningless. And the most basic unit of loyalty contracted down to something smaller and more personal than any acronym. It contracted down to the block. On the West Side of South King Drive between 63rd and 66th Streets, sits a post-war apartment complex that was built between 1950 and 1955 and named Parkway Gardens.
When it was built, it was marketed as modernist affordable housing, a clean and dignified solution for working-class black families who had been pushed out of neighborhoods closer to downtown. That framing did not survive contact with Chicago’s history of municipal disinvestment. By the 1990s, Parkway Gardens was overcrowded, poorly maintained, patrolled by gangs, and largely forgotten by the city agencies theoretically responsible for it.
The people who lived there were not forgotten by each other though. In the way that happens in places where the state has vacated, community filled the gap. And the community that grew inside Parkway Gardens was intense and layered and bound together by the specific intimacy of people who share hardship in a confined space.
East of King Drive, across the street and into the blocks east of the boundary, sat a different landscape. Wood-frame houses and two-flats along St. Lawrence Avenue, Eberhart Avenue, and Vernon Avenue. Narrower streets, lower buildings, the kind of neighborhood geography that produced a different rhythm than the apartment complex across the way.
The Gangster Disciples had deep roots in these blocks and the faction that would eventually be known as STL/EBT, shorthand for St. Lawrence and Eberhart, was not an imported organization. It was grown there from people who were born there, who went to school around the corner, who had cousins and aunties on those specific blocks and nowhere else.
Before the violence arrived in its full form, young people from Parkway Gardens and St. Lawrence crossed King Drive all the time. They played at the same parks, they attended the same schools. Some of their families were linked by blood or by marriage because the South Side is not as large as outsiders imagine it.
And people who grow up in the same zip code end up entangled with each other in ways that go far beyond gang affiliation. There were teenagers from O Block who had dated girls from St. Lawrence. There were kids from STL who had older brothers in Parkway because when the shooting eventually started, the gunmen and their targets often knew each other’s first names, knew what each other looked like before the streets hardened their faces.
By 2007-2008, incidents were already beginning to stack. The early flash points involved sets that were adjacent to what would become O Block and STL proper, Wick City, 600, TYMB, THF 46, 051 Young Money, Jarvo City. It began mostly with a dice game argument or a drive-by at a park or a fist fight that went one step further than usual.
These were not yet a war in the full sense. They were the preconditions of war, the pressure building inside a container. Each small incident leaving behind a little more heat, a little more residue, until the container itself becomes the problem. In September 2007, D Thang from Brick City and Ty from what was then called Young Money Boys killed Dalvin from Jarvo City.
In August 2008, D Thang cemented his reputation by killing Hardy from Jarvo City. A month later, Aki from THF 46 killed Zeko from 051 Young Money over a dice game. And that single act of violence opened a war between those two sets that would run parallel to the main conflict for years. In May 2009, Chicken from STL/EBT killed Ty from what had been the Young Money Boys.
And in a gesture that captures how intensely these blocks processed their grief, the crew renamed themselves TYMB, Ty, You’re my brother. Two months later, another killing hit differently. Lil Mo from 300 Lamron was killed by Tone Bone from No Love City, and Lil Mo happened to be blood cousin to Lil Reese and best friend to a teenager named Durk Banks, who would eventually become one of the most commercially successful rappers in the country.
The grief in those blocks was starting to accumulate names. Then, in August 2010, a 29-year-old WIC City member named Rondo was shot and killed during what was supposed to be a fist fight between STL and WIC City. Up to that point, the two sets had a kind of informal understanding.
They would fight with their hands, not their guns. When someone died, that understanding died with him. The violence was metastasizing, and every new death expanded the circle of who was in it. By January 2011, the blocks on either side of King Drive had been through enough incidents to establish a general state of hostility.
But, what happened on the evening of January 12th changed the emotional texture of that hostility in a way that nothing before it had managed to do. The sun had set just after 5:00, the way it does in Chicago in January, dropping the neighborhood into a darkness that the streetlights never quite compensate for.
15-year-old Shaondale Gregory stood at a bus shelter on the corner of East 63rd Street and St. Lawrence Avenue, waiting for the bus that ran east and west along 63rd. Around 6:45 in the evening, a man walked up to the bus shelter and asked Shaondale if another bus was coming soon.
It was the kind of question anyone might ask, the kind of casual bus stop interaction that happens a thousand times a day in the city. Then, the man stepped behind the glass enclosure, pulled a silver handgun, and shot Shaondale once in the back. When Shaondale collapsed, the man did not run.
He stepped closer and fired three more times. Then, he walked, not ran, but walked into a nearby alley and disappeared into the night. Shaondale Gregory died on that sidewalk while the next bus rolled past, while first responders tried to help a boy who was already gone, while his flip phone buzzed with calls from people who did not yet know.
Police suspected gang involvement. Shaondale was believed to be affiliated with the Gangster Disciple set, and the bus stop sat at the northern boundary of STL EBT territory. No arrest was made that night. No arrest was made for months. In the void that opened up where answers should have been, the people who loved Shaondale Gregory did what people do when institutions failed them.
They created their own meaning. They spray-painted his name on the walls. They held vigils. They renamed their block in his memory and called it Tookaville, because Tooka was what they called him. And across King Drive in Parkway Gardens, a very different conversation was taking shape. The story that circulated in the weeks after Tooka’s death was that members of the Black Disciples from Parkway Gardens had been responsible.
Whether that story was accurate has never been legally proven. But, in an environment where official channels produced nothing, and where the internet was becoming the primary medium through which young people processed and communicated trauma, the story did not need a courtroom to achieve the force of fact.
Posts went up mocking Tooka. The phrase smoking on Tooka began appearing in online spaces and would eventually migrate into rap lyrics, transforming a murder victim into a recurring punchline used to taunt his friends and family. The cruelty of that transformation cannot be overstated. His mother was alive.
His friends were alive, and they were watching their grief turned into entertainment. Eight months later, on the night of August 10th, 2011, a 20-year-old man named Odee Perry was standing near the Parkway Gardens entrance around 11:30 at night when a shooter opened fire. The bullet struck him in the neck. Paramedics rushed him to Stroger Hospital, but he was pronounced dead shortly after arrival.
The location of his killing, almost exactly one block from where Tooka had died, made the geography feel deliberate. And then, the speculation began, because speculation was all that was available. The story that spread through the blocks and through Twitter was that a teenage girl from the St.
Lawrence side, a 14-year-old named Gakirah Barnes, who went by KI, had been the shooter. The story made KI a legend on one side and a target on the other. Whether she pulled that trigger remains legally unresolved, but the legend itself was already operating as a fact, was already changing how people moved and what people feared.
The men and women in Parkway Gardens did for Odee what had been done for Tooka. They took his name, and they mapped it onto where they lived. They called it O Block. The apartment complex on King Drive became O Block, not just as a location, but as an ideology, a statement about identity and loss and belonging and loyalty that could not be separated from the name of a young man who had been shot in the neck on a late summer night.
Two dead boys, two renamed blocks, two communities that had once shared parks and schools and cousins, now staring at each other across King Drive with a grief so concentrated it had curdled into something else entirely. What happens next does not slow down. It layers, each incident arriving on top of the last one, each death adding weight to a structure that is already bearing more than it can hold.
In October 2011, Wooski and Brick from STL walked up on a young man named Platoon from O Block while he was standing with his girlfriend, shot him in the head, and kept walking. A 15-year-old bystander down the block also took a bullet to the head. He survived. Platoon did not. Two weeks later, Chief Keef dropped a track called John Madden that went after Tooka specifically, that used his name as a lyric, that broadcast the taunt to anyone with a Wi-Fi connection.
The diss track as a weapon was fully operational now. In late 2011, C-Day from 600 killed Tutu from Jaro City, and Tutu’s death restructured the mentorship on the STL side in a specific way. With Tutu gone, KI stepped up to coach the younger members of Jaro City, teaching them how to move and who to target.
She was a teenager coaching younger teenagers in the mechanics of a war that most of the participants were too young to vote in. By December, D-Rose from 600 killed Dale from STL as revenge for Platoon. The tit-for-tat rhythm was establishing itself, the logic of retribution that would govern every subsequent year of this conflict.
The year 2012 arrived with the tension already at a pitch that should have been unsustainable, and yet it kept rising. On February 10th, a member named Sheroid from O Block was killed by STL shooter named Boss Trello, who reportedly used a laser sight to aim across the street and shoot him in the head. Two months later, T-Roy from O Block and Cortez from T.I.M.B.
killed Doc in retaliation for Sheroid. The thing about Doc that WBEZ and other local reporters documented was that he had been out of prison for two months. He had received his GED while incarcerated. He was pursuing a painter’s license. He was trying to guide younger relatives away from the streets.
His aunt said he was looking for steady work and did not want to be involved in street life anymore. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is to say he had been in the neighborhood he grew up in, which in this war was enough to make you a target. Then, September 4th, 2012 arrived, and the war’s connection to the music that was growing out of it tightened into something the entire country would notice.
Joseph Coleman, 18 years old, went by Lil Jojo. He was affiliated with a Gangster Disciple set, and he had been publicly trading disses online with Chief Keef, Lil Reese, and Lil Durk, who were all on the Black Disciple side. His song 300K was a direct insult to Chief Keef’s 300 inches click posted online for anyone to see.
On the evening of September 4th, Jojo was riding on the back of his friend’s bicycle near 69th Street and Princeton Avenue when a four-door Ford Taurus pulled up alongside him, and someone inside fired six or seven shots. Jojo jumped off and tried to run. He collapsed before he made it anywhere and was pronounced dead at the hospital.
In the hours that followed his murder, an account associated with Chief Keef tweeted that it was sad because Jojo wanted to be just like them, followed by a laughing hashtag. Keith would later claim his account had been hacked. The controversy exploded nationally, putting the South Side of Chicago on the front page of entertainment news outlets and giving the wider world its first sustained look at a conflict that had been consuming these blocks for nearly two years.
Three months after Jojo’s murder on Christmas Day in 2012, an 18-year-old named Joshua Davis, who went by Jay Loud, walked out of his home wearing a hoodie with Jojo World printed on it in memory of his friend. His brother told reporters afterward that the sweatshirt made him a target. He was shot and killed on West 69th Street.
A piece of mourning clothing had gotten a teenager killed. Every symbol was now a weapon. By 2012 and into 2013, the blocks on both sides of King Drive had produced enough death to fill a grievance ledger that no single person could fully account for. Within the STL EBT faction, a 17-year-old named Rodney Stewart, who went by Boss Trello, had apparently decided he needed out.
He purchased a bus ticket to Iowa. He was planning to move in two days. On the morning of November 8th, 2012, he was found face down in an alley in the 2600 block of West 83rd Street, shot in the back of the head. He died later that day. His family described him to WBEZ as a quiet, silly boy who liked to clean and liked to go to bed early.
Online, he had presented a different face, aligned with the STL/EBT clique, and visible in a world where visibility invited retaliation. Two days from Iowa. That detail passed through the community like a ghost, because what it suggested was that there was no leaving. That the war had already decided who you were and where you were allowed to go, and that a bus ticket was not a solution.
The people who celebrated his death on Twitter understood this perfectly and used it as a taunt. The grief on the STL side absorbed it and hardened. A young man named Davon Bennett was watching all this from inside Parkway Gardens, where he had grown up and where the people he loved were dying.
He was born in 1994, which meant that in 2012 he was 18 years old, and he was already known on the block as someone you did not underestimate. He had been arrested multiple times as a teenager. He had been incarcerated. He understood the war not as an abstraction, but as the specific texture of his life, as the names tattooed on the arms of his friends, as the murals on the walls of the neighborhood, as the faces of people he had grown up with who were now only present in photographs.
The streets called him King Von. There is a specific way that the culture of these blocks processed certain deaths, which is through mythology, through transforming what was tragic into what was legendary, and King Von would eventually become one of the most gifted practitioners of that mythology making that drill music had ever produced.
But in 2012 and 2013, he was still just a young man inside the war, still accumulating the experiences that would eventually become lyrics. Meanwhile, the drill music scene was going supernova. Chief Keef had signed a major label deal in 2012. His track I Don’t Like had gone viral with a Kanye West remix and put the South Side of Chicago in the conversations that were happening in studios in New York and Los Angeles.
The sound was traveling out of its origin point and into the wider culture, and as it traveled it brought the geography with it, which meant that the names Tooka and Odee and O Block and STL began appearing in contexts far removed from East 63rd Street. Fans in other cities started engaging with the content of the feud as if it were entertainment, leaving comments on YouTube videos, taking sides, adding the velocity of internet culture to a conflict that was already moving too fast. Nobody in this
story is more difficult to write about than Gakirah Barnes, because the story that surrounded her was, from the beginning, a mixture of documented reality and mythologized speculation that the internet then calcified into something fixed and permanent. What the documentation shows is this.
She joined the St. Lawrence faction of the Gangster Disciples at 14 years old, and between 2011 and 2014, she was allegedly involved in multiple shootings. A Columbia University study that researchers published in 2016 documented that she posted more than 27,000 tweets in roughly 3 years, many of them directed at rivals, many of them containing veiled or not so veiled threats.
She was famous in a very particular way, the kind of fame that exists entirely within a five-block radius and on certain corners of the internet, the kind of fame that makes you a target. On April 11th, 2014, she posted a photo of herself and her friends on a porch in Woodlawn. The photo placed her around 3:30 in the afternoon on that same day, gunmen found her on South Eberhart Avenue and opened fire.
She was hit in the jaw, in the chest, and in the neck, and she was pronounced dead at 5:43 in the evening. She was 17 years old. Researchers who later wrote about her death noted that her tweet revealing her location may have contributed to what happened to her. The digital trail she had spent years building, the online presence that had made her notorious and had given her a kind of power within a very limited geography, had in the end given someone else the coordinates they needed.
The speculation about who pulled the trigger on Gakirah Barnes circulated immediately and has never stopped circulating. Many people across Chicago and later across the internet believed that the shooter was King Von, who had been a close friend of Odee Perry and T Roy, and who had, by 2014, established his own reputation on the streets.
Police never charged him, but the belief in his involvement spread widely enough that his notoriety within the drill scene accelerated sharply. And years later, when he recorded a song called Crazy Story that described shooting a woman who had set him up, the fans who were paying attention heard it as a confession.
Whether it was meant to be one is a question that only he could have answered, and he is not available to answer it. What Barnes’ death did to the STL/EBT side of the conflict was what every high-profile death did. It renewed the obligation to retaliate, added another name to the grievance ledger, and intensified the paranoia that was already governing how everyone moved.
At the same time, two days after her death, a Black Disciples rapper named Blood Money, who was a cousin of Chief Keef and had recently signed to Interscope Records, was shot and killed on the South Side, suggesting that even commercial success provided no insulation from the war. The violence was eating everything.
It would be a mistake to treat the music as a separate thread from the violence, because it was never separate. Drill did not grow out of the O Block versus STL conflict the way a documentary soundtrack is added in post-production. It grew out of the same soil as the conflict, was watered by the same deaths, expressed the same grief and rage and paranoia that the shootings expressed, and the distinction between the music and the street, if it ever existed, was gone by 2013.
The drill sound that came out of Chicago’s South Side was built on ominous beats, deadpan delivery, and lyrics that treated violence not as metaphor, but as reportage. The authenticity was the point. When Chief Keef rapped about 300, he was not building a brand identity in the conventional marketing sense.
He was making a statement about where he was from and who was dead and who his enemies were. And those statements had consequences that extended far beyond the streaming numbers. Sociologist Forrest Stuart spent years embedded in the Chicago drill scene and documented in his book Ballad of the Bullet how young men from marginalized neighborhoods leveraged platforms like YouTube and Twitter to gain attention by performing extreme versions of their street identities. The term microcelebrity
does not capture the full complexity of what was happening, but it points at something real. That in the digital attention economy, visibility became currency, and violence, or the performance of violence, was the fastest way to become visible. What this meant practically was that every diss track became a strategic document.
When Lil Jojo posted 300K in 2012, he was not just making music. He was making a statement within a conflict that everyone in those blocks understood was being waged simultaneously with guns and with content. When STL rapper Lil Marc released No Competition in March 2014, the lyrics reportedly contained disrespect towards several dead members of rival gangs.
Days later, he was shot and killed at a bus stop in the 300 block of East 51st Street. He was 20 years old. The song had preceded the bullet. The US Department of Justice would eventually codify this understanding in its federal racketeering case against O Block members for the murder of FBG Duck.
The indictment stated that the gang publicly claimed responsibility for their acts of violence in order to increase their criminal enterprise, and used social media and music to enhance their status and recruit. What the government was describing in that document was a mechanism that had been operating in plain sight for a decade, the feedback loop between violence and content, each one feeding the other, the music advertising the war to a global audience, while the war supplied the music with its material.
The fans became part of the architecture. Instagram accounts dedicated to tracking Chicago street drama, YouTube channels that built audiences by narrating the feud, comment sections where people from states that had nothing to do with any of this would type things about whose side they were on. The spectacle was global.
The consequences were local. Boys on St. Lawrence Avenue were dying, and people in London were watching reaction videos about it. And the attention itself created pressure, because in a world where visibility was currency, being seen required maintaining a posture, and the posture required the escalation. James Johnson, who went by T Roy, was 23 years old and one of King Von’s closest friends.
He was from O Block, had been in that world long enough to have the full weight of its history on him, and on February 14th, 2017, he was entering a store in the South Shore neighborhood, which is several miles from Parkway Gardens, but close enough to be dangerous for someone with his affiliations.
A gunman approached him in the 2000 block of East 71st Street and shot him in the chest. He died from his wounds Valentine’s Day in Chicago, and O Block lost one of its own. King Von’s response to T Roy’s death was not documented in a police report or a court filing. It was documented in the way these things were documented on the South Side, through street knowledge and subsequent events, and eventually, through music.
The understanding on the blocks was that the killing of Poppie and Telley from the St. Lawrence faction followed shortly after T-Roy’s death and that Von was responsible. None of that is legally proven, but the war’s internal accounting, its own record keeping separate from any courthouse, registered those deaths as retaliation and the STL/EBT side registered them as obligations.
The stack grew taller. That same year in July, FBG Brick, whose government name was Rema Robinson and who was the older brother of FBG Duck, was killed alongside his friend Stanley Mack, who went by Kobe Mack. Both were shot around 3:00 in the afternoon in the 6300 block of South St. Lawrence Avenue. Brick was 26 years old.
FBG Duck later said that he lost his brother and his cousin on the same day. And if you are trying to understand the specific coordinates of Carlton Weekly’s hatred, his own war against the people he held responsible, that sentence is your starting point. His brother and his cousin on the same day on the same block where he grew up.
Also in 2017, a STL shooter known as TB was killed, reportedly in retaliation. An O-Block member named HK was shot dead after leaving a friend’s funeral. People were being killed at funerals, which had once been a line that even the most violent participants in this war observed, not out of moral consideration, but out of a practical understanding that certain spaces needed to remain neutral or the whole structure collapsed.
By 2017, that understanding was gone. October 2018 and the funeral of a man named Duski Tha Man, people gathered on the church steps in broad daylight to pay their respects. A shooter appeared and opened fire into the crowd. Multiple people were hit, including Marvel Williams, known as FBG Wooski, one of the most prominent rappers on the STL/EBT side.
Wooski took a bullet to the head. He survived, but the injury damaged his memory and his speech, taking from him the very tools that a rapper needs most. The attack was recorded on cell phones and circulated widely online and the message it sent was the message that the war had been sending for years with increasing volume.
There was no safe space, not a church, not a funeral, not a store on a shopping street in a wealthy neighborhood. Durk Banks grew up in Parkway Gardens and lost people for as long as he can remember losing people. By 2018, he was Lil Durk, a commercially successful rapper signed to his own label, Only The Family, with a following that extended far beyond the South Side.
He had moved to suburban Atlanta. He was trying to build something legal, something lasting, but the war had a way of reaching. His cousin, McArthur Swindle, who rapped under the name OTF NuNu, was shot and killed at a Chicago strip mall in 2014. King Von, who was not just a label partner, but a close friend and the person Durk had co-signed to the world, was killed in 2020.
Durk himself was arrested in Atlanta in 2019 alongside Von on attempted murder and robbery charges related to a shooting outside a restaurant, though prosecutors eventually dropped the case. The tension in Durk’s story is the tension in the story of every person from those blocks who managed to build something.
The music had made them visible to the world, had given them platforms and audiences and income, but the same visibility that built the platform made them findable. And the affiliations that had shaped them, that were in some sense inseparable from who they were and what made their music resonate, those affiliations were not things you could simply discard when they became inconvenient.
The streets had given them their authenticity and authenticity was their product. The war had given them their material and the material was what people were buying. August 4th, 2020 and Carlton Weekly is a successful recording artist with a following that extends internationally. He’s on Oak Street in Chicago’s Gold Coast with his girlfriend on a Tuesday afternoon, moving through one of the wealthiest retail corridors in the state, as far removed geographically from the blocks on either side of King Drive as you can get while
still being in the same city. Two cars come down the street. Four men get out. Carlton takes at least 16 bullets and dies at Northwestern Memorial Hospital a short time later. The surveillance footage was everywhere within hours. The spectacle of a gang assassination on a street lined with designer boutiques, with tourists diving for cover, with store windows shattering behind the gunmen, produced a kind of collective stunned silence in Chicago that the city had not felt in years. Not because it was the first time
a prominent rapper from the South Side had been killed, but because the choice of location seemed to announce something. The war had always been contained, at least nominally, within its geographic origin. This killing said there was no longer a boundary. Wherever you were, the war was willing to travel.
The federal indictment that followed in October 2021 named five alleged O-Block members. Charles Liggins, who went by C Murder, Kenneth Roberson, known as Kenny Mack, Tacarlos Offord, known as Los, Christopher Thomas, known as C Thang, and Marcus Smart, known as Muwop. Prosecutors alleged that these men had killed FBG Duck to increase their standing within the Black Disciples and had then publicly claimed responsibility using social media and music to broadcast what they had done.
In April 2023, a superseding indictment added a sixth defendant, Ralph Turpin, who went by Teezy. In January 2024, after two days of deliberations, a federal jury convicted all six defendants on multiple counts of murder and conspiracy. The prosecution had framed the killing explicitly as the product of a years-long conflict stoked by drill rap diss tracks between Duck and King Von.
Duck’s family embraced in the courtroom as the verdicts were read. His mother had said after his death that she was tired of burying children and that she wanted peace. The convictions gave her something that the street never could, which was an official account, a record, a legal acknowledgement that what happened to her son was not random, but it did not give her Carlton back.
On November 6th, 2020, just 1 month after releasing his debut studio album, Welcome to O-Block, Dayvon Bennett was outside the Monaco Hookah Lounge in Atlanta around 4:00 in the morning. The argument that started that night between his group and another group escalated quickly into gunfire. Two off-duty police officers who were working security at the venue attempted to intervene.
Von was shot during the initial exchange of gunfire. He and two others died at the hospital. The man police identified as the shooter was Timothy Leeks, an associate of the rapper Quando Rondo. Leeks claimed self-defense. The legal proceedings that followed were complicated and ongoing for years, but what rippled through the community immediately was not the legal question, it was the grief and beneath the grief for some, the sense that something had completed itself, that the arc of King Von’s life had been
shaped by this war from the beginning and had ended inside it, even though he was in a different state, even though he had made it out in every conventional sense, had gotten the deal and the numbers and the acclaim, the war had followed him to Atlanta. Hundreds of people gathered in Parkway Gardens when the news broke.
They lit candles under a mural of his face on the side of a building. The mural was surrounded by the names of every O-Block member who had been killed before him. The same names that had appeared in his lyrics, the same names that were painted on the walls of the neighborhood, the same names that teenagers on St.
Lawrence Avenue had seen as targets. The grief was enormous and public and completely continuous with the grief that had been accumulating in that neighborhood since January 2011, when a 15-year-old waited for a bus and did not make it home. By 2021, the accounting was brutal on both sides.
STL/EBT had lost Tooka, Boss Trell, KI, TB, FBG Brick, Lil Marc and eventually FBG Duck to gunfire. Key members who had survived were grappling with injuries and trauma that would be permanent. O-Block had lost OD, T-Roy, HK and King Von and five of its members were now sitting in federal custody facing life sentences for a murder they had apparently committed on a busy shopping street in front of surveillance cameras, which is the kind of decision that speaks to how far outside any rational self-preservation calculus this
war had pushed its participants. The federal racketeering case changed something. It signaled to younger members and to adjacent sets that the government was now willing to treat gang murders as organized crime conspiracies, which meant that participating in the war carried not just the risk of getting killed, but the risk of being put away for the rest of your life under RICO statutes that were designed for the mafia.
That calculus had an effect, not immediately, not completely, but gradually the overt hostility between the specific blocks that had defined the war began to diminish. Demographic shifts played a role, too. As Parkway Gardens raised its rents and enforced stricter management, families dispersed. Gentrification crept up from the University of Chicago campus and brought with it more police patrols and surveillance cameras on corners where the only cameras had previously been phones.
The remaining participants were exhausted in the way that people become exhausted after a decade of funerals, of grief counseling, of visiting people in hospitals and in jails. The younger teenagers who might have been recruited into the feud grew up watching their older cousins die or go away and chose different paths or at least different conflicts.
What does not diminish is the residue. The children who grew up on those blocks during the peak years of the war grew up with a specific understanding of the world. That grief was the organizing principle of community. That loyalty to the dead was a more binding obligation than any legal or civic institution.
That visibility was both protection and target. And that the line between music and reality was a fiction maintained only by people who were not close enough to see clearly. Some of those children are adults now, carrying all of that inside them. And the mental health crisis on the South Side of Chicago, the PTSD and the depression and the hyper-vigilance that nobody writes documentary scripts about because it is invisible.
That is the war’s longest-lasting wound. The deepest truth about the O Block versus STL EBT war is that it became a system. It was not a simple feud between two groups of people with a grievance. It was a feedback loop, closed and self-sustaining. In which generated retaliation.
Retaliation generated music. Music generated attention. Attention generated pressure to perform the violence that the attention demanded. And performance generated more real violence. Which generated more grief. Every component fed every other component. The deaths were real. The music was real. The attention was real.
The consequences were real. And yet the system processed all of it as fuel, kept running on it, kept demanding more. The internet was the mechanism that closed the loop. Before social media, a block war on the South Side of Chicago had a natural boundary. It was contained by geography, by the range of who knew about it, by the speed at which information could travel through a neighborhood.
After social media, a block war on the South Side of Chicago was global within hours. Every shooting became content. Every funeral became a post. Every diss track became a viral moment that reached an audience of millions. Most of whom had no stake in the outcome. Most of whom consumed it as entertainment.
And whose consumption created exactly the economic and reputational incentives that kept the violence going. Gakirah Barnes posted her location and was dead within hours. FBG Duck live-streamed from his location and was found by the people who wanted to find him. King Von posted from Atlanta clubs and kept his affiliations visible to an audience that included both fans and enemies.
Every time someone chose visibility, and they were incentivized to choose visibility because visibility was the currency of the attention economy they were embedded in, they were also choosing risk. The platform that gave them power gave their enemies information. There was no way to have one without the other.
What makes this story different from other gang conflict narratives is the scale at which it played out. And the degree to which it illustrated a new kind of urban warfare. One in which the traditional logic of the streets had been colonized by the logic of content creation. In which status was measured not just in who you had outlasted, but in who was watching you outlast them.
The boys from Parkway Gardens and St. Lawrence Avenue were not media strategists. They were not calculating their YouTube metrics when they posted their locations or their disses or their memorials. They were doing what people do when they are in pain and when the culture around them has given them a specific set of tools.
They were using the tools. The tools just happened to be extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily indifferent to the cost. The mural of King Von is still on the wall in Parkway Gardens. So are the murals of OD and T Roy and the others who came before them and after them. On the STL EBT side, the names of the dead are on walls, too.
Are in the songs that still circulate on streaming platforms. Are in the mouths of people who grew up breathing the same air as Tooka and Boss Trell and Gakirah Barnes. The blocks are quieter now than they were in 2017 or 2018. Some of the buildings are different. Some of the people are gone. But the names remain.
Because names in these communities are not just memorials. They are arguments. They are the language through which the living continue a conversation with the dead. And through which one side of a block war continues to speak to the other across a distance that was never really geographic to begin with.
FBG Duck’s mother stood outside the courthouse in January 2024 when the six men convicted of killing her son received their verdicts. She had said after his death that she was tired of bearing children. The conviction was not a resurrection. It was not a son. It was a verdict on a system that had been consuming boys from these blocks for more than a decade.
Had consumed them at a bus stop in 2011 and at a hookah lounge in Atlanta in 2020 and on a high-end shopping street in 2020 while tourists ran for cover. The legal system had finally weighed in. Had said formally and with the force of law that what had happened constituted organized crime. That the music and the social media and the public claiming of murders were not just cultural expression, but instruments of a criminal enterprise.
But the criminal enterprise grew out of something that was not criminal in its origin. It grew out of abandoned housing and defunded schools. And a city that had drawn a boundary around certain neighborhoods and decided what happened inside them was not its problem. It grew out of the split between David Barksdale and Larry Hoover in 1974.
And out of the decades of institutional failure that followed that split. And out of the specific geography of two sets of blocks on either side of South King Drive. Where young people who might have been friends ended up being enemies. And it grew out of grief. Which is the least complicated thing in the whole story. Which is also the most powerful.
Two boys dead in 2011. Their names painted on walls. Their memory turned into the justification for a war that would run for a decade and produce dozens of dead and hundreds of shattered lives. In a federal racketeering case. In a mural in Parkway Gardens that people still come to light candles under when the wind is cold and the sun goes down early.
Shondale Gregory waited for a bus in January of 2011. And the war that started at that bus stop is still, in the ways that matter most, not over.
