September 4th, 2005. A concrete cell block inside Pelican Bay State Prison, Crescent City, California. The walls were painted red, not paint, blood. Lloyd Avery II was lying on the cold floor, positioned on top of a pentagram drawn in his own blood by the man who had just strangled him. His Christian Bible sat on the bunk above.
He had been trying to save his cellmate’s soul. Instead, his cellmate, a self-proclaimed Satanist named Kevin Roby, had crushed his throat as part of a ritual. A warning, he later said, to God himself. Time of discovery. Right before the noon count, the whole murder took less than 15 minutes. This wasn’t just another inmate.
This was the kid America watched gun down Ricky Baker, the blood in the cardinal red Hyundai. The sawed-off shotgun pointed out the window in one of the most devastating scenes in American cinema. Lloyd Avery II was knucklehead number two. He had four scenes, eight lines of dialogue, two minutes of screen time in Boyz n the Hood, and it haunted him until the day he died on that prison floor.
This is the story behind the most important black film of the 1990s, the movie John Singleton built from his own South Central memories, the film that opened to gunfire in 20 theaters across the country. And the cast members whose lives ended exactly the way the screenplay warned they would.
This is the story of how a movie about the cycle of violence became a prophecy, and how the prophecy came true for the actors who played in it. But here’s what most people don’t know. The blurring of fiction and reality started before the cameras even rolled. The set itself was a war zone. Real Bloods walked up to producers and threatened to kill Ice Cube.
Real Crips showed up demanding to be in scenes. And by the time the film was released, two young men who appeared on screen were already on a collision course with the same streets they were depicting. Stay with me. To understand what happened, you have to start in 1987. A 19-year-old kid named John Daniel Singleton walks onto the campus of the University of Southern California.
He was born January 6th, 1968. Raised between his mother Sheila, a sales executive, and his father Danny, a real estate agent. South Central kid. The kind of neighborhood where the buffer against the drugs and the dying was a stack of comic books and a VCR. He had thought about computer science. Then he switched into the filmic writing program under Margaret Mering.
It was a program designed to put students directly into Hollywood as writer-directors. Singleton took it seriously. By the time he graduated in 1990, he had a screenplay finished. He’d been writing it since he was a teenager. He called it Boys n the Hood. The script landed on the desk of Stephanie Allain, a Columbia Pictures executive looking for new black voices.
She believed in him immediately. She arranged the meeting with Columbia chairman Frank Price. And here’s where Singleton did something almost nobody does. He turned down a six-figure offer for the screenplay alone. He told them, “I write it, I direct it, or there’s no deal.” He was 22 years old.
He had directed nothing. And the chairman of Columbia Pictures said, “Yes.” The budget came in between 5.7 and 6.5 million dollars. Tiny. Veteran producer Steve Nicolaides came aboard to babysit the kid. They met at Singleton’s mother’s house over homemade lemonade. Nicolaides gave Singleton two rules. Don’t hire a production designer when an art director will do, and don’t cast anyone famous except for Laurence Fishburne.
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Singleton agreed. Then came the casting. Singleton wanted N.W.A., the whole group. Dr. Dre as Monster, Eazy-E as Chris, MC Ren as Dooky, and Ice Cube as Doughboy. By late 1989, that plan collapsed when Cube left N.W.A. But Cube and Singleton had history. They first met backstage at The Arsenio Hall Show, then again at a Louis Farrakhan rally.
Both times Singleton told him, “I’m going to put you in a movie.” Both times Cube laughed it off. Then in 1990, they ran into each other at a Public Enemy concert at The Palace. They stood in the parking lot until it emptied. Months later, the script reached Cube’s manager. Doughboy was his. For Tre Styles, the lead, Singleton picked Cuba Gooding Jr.
22 years old, unknown. Morris Chestnut got Ricky Baker. Nia Long played Brandy. Tyra Ferrell got Brenda Baker, the mother. Angela Bassett got Reva. Regina King played Shalika in her early career. Larry Fishburne, the only name in the cast, took on Furious Styles, the father. The crew was building something nobody had built before.
A film about black masculinity, black fatherhood, and the cycle of street death made by a kid from the same streets. Call time was 7:00 a.m. on October 1st, 1990. Singleton was on set at 5:30 in the morning, watching the trucks unload. The shoot was scheduled for 42 days. 2 months in South Central. And almost immediately, the streets came for the production.
The barbecue scene, it turned into a real party. A day and a half lost, but that was the easy problem. The hard problem walked up to producer Steve Nicolaides at a place called the Boulevard Cafe. His name was Bone. He was a leader from the Bloods, and he wanted a meeting. Bone sat down and told Nicolaides exactly what he knew.
“I know you’re shooting a scene where Ice Cube blows away three Bloods at a hamburger stand that’s across the street from the jungle. Some 14-year-old kid wanting to earn stripes is going to bust a cap in Ice Cube.” He wasn’t threatening the production. He was warning them. He was telling them, “If you film this here, somebody is going to die for real.
” Then came a fight on set. Members of Cube’s Lynch Mob crew got into it with a local kid. Things almost exploded. Nicolaides paid for security. He paid for goodwill. He paid the local OGs to keep their soldiers off the corners during the shoot. That’s how Boyz n the Hood got made, not just with cameras and lights, with negotiated peace treaties.
In the middle of this storm, John Singleton needed to fill the smaller roles, the bit parts, the faces in the background who would carry the weight of the violence. And that’s where Lloyd Avery II walked into the story. Lloyd Fernandez Avery II was born June 21st, 1969 in Los Angeles. He didn’t grow up in the jungle.
He didn’t grow up in Compton. He grew up in View Park, the black Beverly Hills. His father, Lloyd Sr., was a self-employed service technician. His mother, Linda, worked in a bank. The kid grew up with a swimming pool in the backyard. He went to Beverly Hills High School. He played water polo. He played baseball.
He was friends with the children of Smokey Robinson, of Quincy Jones, of music executive Clarence Avant. This was a kid with every door already open. Avery had met John Singleton when Singleton was still a film student at USC. When Boyz n the Hood went into production, Singleton remembered him. He cast him as knucklehead number two, the blood who would emerge from the cardinal red Hyundai, the shotgun in his hands, the face that would chase Ricky Baker down the alley between two homes on a sunny South Central afternoon. Four
scenes, eight lines, the most chilling two minutes of the entire movie. Then there was Dedrick D’wayne GoBear, born November 25th, 1971. Inglewood kid. Singleton cast him as Dooky, the funny one in Doughboy’s crew, the one who carried a 40 all afternoon, the one who teased Ricky about his football scholarship.
GoBear was 20 years old when the cameras rolled. He had real charisma, the kind you can’t teach. The shoot wrapped in late 1990. Columbia set the release for July 12th, 1991. They booked the film into 900 theaters nationwide. They had no idea what was coming. July 12th, 1991, opening night.
John Singleton, 23 years old, was doing what young directors do. He drove between theaters in Los Angeles, sneaking into the back to watch his own movie play. Around 9:30 p.m., he left the Cineplex Odeon in Universal City. Minutes after he walked out, gunfire erupted inside. Five people were wounded. One witness, a 19-year-old, told the LA Times, “The lights went down and the screen lit up and then it just went crazy.
There was gunfire. These guys were just chasing each other all over.” By the end of opening weekend, the count was staggering. Incidents at 20 different theaters across the country. Universal City, Upland, Chino, San Francisco, Sacramento, Minneapolis, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, New Springfield, Massachusetts, Jersey City, Chicago.
In Minneapolis, somebody fired a shot inside the theater. The crowd panicked and ran into the street. Shooters in a waiting car opened fire on the fleeing crowd. Four people wounded, two critically. By the time the bullets stopped flying that weekend, the totals were brutal. One man dead, 23 wounded. Frank Price, the chairman of Columbia, said something later that revealed exactly what was happening.
If you had an incident within a mile of the theater, the press connected it to Boys in the Hood. It tamped down the box office. People got the impression it was dangerous to go see the movie. Hard to get people to risk their lives to see your film. Singleton stood his ground. He told the press, >> The violence is indicative of the degeneration of American society, not a reflection of my film, which is about family, love, and friendship.
I didn’t create the conditions under which people shoot each other. >> Then he said the line that mattered most. >> To withdraw the film would be an act of artistic racism. >> Columbia agreed. They didn’t pull the movie. They kicked in additional security money. They kept it in theaters. And Boys in the Hood went on to gross 57.
5 million dollars worldwide. Almost 10 times its budget. In March of 1992, the Academy Award nominations came out. >> It was the 24-year-old black director, Mr. John Singleton. >> He also became the first African-American ever nominated in that category. He was also nominated for best original screenplay.
He didn’t win, either. But the door was kicked down. The cycle that the movie warned about, the cycle Furious Styles preached about on that bench under the street light, kept turning in the real world. And the first cast member it would claim was Dedrick Gobert. November 19th, 1994, about 2:20 in the morning at El Wanda Avenue, Mira Loma, an isolated road in Riverside County, California.
About 40 people had gathered out there for illegal drag races, the kind of scene young car guys lived for in the early ’90s. Dedrick Gobert was there. He was 22 years old. He had 3 years of credits behind him. Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice with Janet Jackson. He had wrapped Higher Learning scheduled for release in 2 months.
Gobert raced another man on the road. Something happened during the race, an argument broke out afterward. According to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, several gang members confronted Gobert. A 19-year-old kid named Ignacio Hernandez from Rosemead tried to step in and help him. The shooters opened fire. Dedrick Gobert was shot to death in the roadway.
Ignacio Hernandez was shot to death beside him. A 16-year-old girl took a bullet in the neck and survived. Deputies arrived at 2:20 a.m. The killers had already fled in a 1993 or 1994 Honda Prelude. Authorities said it was gang-related. The man who played Dooky in the most famous film about young black men dying in the streets was now another statistic in the same streets.
He had three movies left to be released after his death. He never saw Higher Learning come out. He never got to age out of the roles. He was buried in Inglewood, the same neighborhood Lloyd Avery II had come from. But, Lloyd Avery’s story is where Boyz n the Hood crosses from drama into something darker, something almost biblical.
After the film came out, Avery’s Hollywood career didn’t take off the way he had hoped. He got a small role on Doogie Howser. Singleton cast him again in Poetic Justice in 1993. He worked on music. He produced a single for Tisha Campbell. But the doors weren’t opening fast enough. The roles weren’t getting bigger.
So Avery did something nobody expected. The View Park kid, the Beverly Hills High School graduate, the boy who grew up around Quincy Jones’s kids, he moved out of his parents’ world, he moved into the jungle, the same Bloods neighborhood that the producers had to negotiate around during filming. He told friends he was a Blood.
When people asked if he was really claiming, he said yes. He started living the character he played on screen. A friend later said, “It was like watching a man walk into his own role and lock the door from the inside.” The crime started small. In 1988, he had already done 3 days in jail after a fight outside a party at UCLA. He was carrying a fake ID.
After Boyz n the Hood, the incidents escalated. He worked a film called Lockdown in 2000. They shot it in New Mexico. On location, Avery was caught smoking a sherm stick, PCP-soaked tobacco. He tried to attack a makeup artist. He broke into a live prison facility. The production asked him to leave the state. Then came July 1st, 1999.
Around 4:00 in the afternoon, Santa Barbara Plaza in the jungle. A man and a woman were sitting under a tree, Annette Lewis, Percy Branch. Lloyd Avery II walked up to them. According to police reports, the argument was over a drug debt. Avery pulled a .45 caliber pistol. He shot Annette Lewis. He shot Percy Branch in the stomach.
And Annette Lewis died that same day. Percy Branch held on. He lingered in the hospital for 3 weeks, then he died from complications. Two people dead over a debt. Avery was arrested outside his grandmother’s house on December 8th, 1999. He went to trial. In December of 2000, a jury convicted him on two counts of first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to life in prison. He arrived at Pelican Bay State Prison in March of 2001. Pelican Bay, the supermax, one of the hardest prisons in the entire California system. The place built for the worst of the worst. Inside Pelican Bay, something strange happened to Lloyd Avery II, the man who had become the character he played on screen, the man who had moved into the jungle and pulled the trigger for real.
That man started reading the Bible. He converted to Christianity. He started writing. He wrote about redemption. He told visitors he was a different person. He was trying to undo what he had become. In August of 2005, a new cellmate was moved in next to him. The man’s name was Kevin Roby, an Air Force Academy dropout.
Roby was serving life without parole for one of the most disturbing crimes in California’s recent history. In 1987, he had raped and murdered his own sister, Velmalynn Hill. He signed his correspondence Satanic Christ. He was a devil worshiper. And he had just been placed in a cell with a man who was trying to save his soul.
For about 3 weeks, Lloyd Avery II tried to convert Kevin Roby to Christianity. Roby resisted. Then on September 4th, 2005, the tension snapped. The accounts vary on exactly how it started. What’s documented is that the two men fought inside the cell. Robey choked Avery unconscious. Avery bled into his lungs. He suffocated. Robey was not done.
He pulled Avery’s body to the center of the cell. He drew a pentagram on the floor in Avery’s blood. He positioned the body on top of it. He painted symbols on the walls. He intended it, he later told investigators, as a ritual, a warning, a message to God himself. The guards found Avery’s body before the Tuesday noon count. He was 36 years old.
He left behind a daughter named Adelia. Years later, in August of 2024, while incarcerated at the California Institution for Men, Kevin Robey allegedly stabbed and injured a correctional officer. He is still alive. And then there was John Singleton himself, the kid from South Central who built it all. After Boyz n the Hood, he kept working.
Poetic Justice, Higher Learning, Rosewood, Shaft, Baby Boy, 2 Fast 2 Furious. He co-created Snowfall for FX, the show about the crack cocaine epidemic that defined his childhood. He had seven children. He kept making films about black life in America when almost nobody in Hollywood would back him. On April 17th, 2019, Singleton suffered a major stroke.
He was placed in intensive care at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. For 11 days, the family waited. On April 28th, 2019, his family removed him from life support. The official cause of death was acute ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, and hypertension. He was 51 years old. So, what is the real story of Boyz n the Hood? It is the story of a 22-year-old kid from South Central who walked into Columbia Pictures and refused to let anyone else direct his life story.
It is the story of a film that was so authentic, real gang leaders had to negotiate its safe passage through real territory. It is the story of a release weekend so violent that 23 people were wounded and one was killed before the credits had even finished rolling in some theaters. It is the story of an actor named Dedrick Gobert who played a kid who died young and then died young exactly like the kid he played.
It is the story of an actor named Lloyd Avery II who played a killer and then became a killer and then was killed by another killer on a concrete prison floor in the far north of California. Boyz n the Hood was never just a movie. It was a warning. The movie said the streets eat their own. The streets agreed.
The movie said violence travels in cycles. The cycles kept turning. The movie said the only escape is awareness. The only ones who escaped were the ones who watched. John Singleton spent the last 28 years of his life trying to tell the world what he saw growing up. Two of his actors lived it on screen and then lived it off screen.
One died at a drag race at 22. One died on a prison floor at 36 in a satanic ritual. The director himself died at 51. The film grossed 57.5 million dollars. It earned two Oscar nominations. It changed American cinema forever. But it could not save the people who made it. That’s the real story of Boyz n the Hood. Not the legend, the truth.
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