Shaquon Thomas, 20, had been the target of gunmen for more than a year.

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Young Pappy Savages
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Young Pappy 2 Cups
Young Pappy 2 Cups

Ben Woodard covered Rogers Park for DNAinfo Chicago from 2012 to 2015. He's now a reporter at the Seattle Times.

ROGERS PARK — North Side rapper Young Pappy never liked me much.

Shaquon Thomas, better known as 'Young Pappy,' was a drill rapper. He was known for popular albums such as '2 Cups (Parts 1, 2, and 3),' 'Beast,' 'Chiraq,' and 'Kila.' He was also a member of a rap group named 'Gangster Disciples.' Shaquon grew up in the streets of Chicago and was involved in several legal issues.
Play on TIDAL or open in our Desktop app Share. Acapella Young Pappy. After Life Part 3.

The gang member's 'rap persona' blew up on social media in 2014 as he released music videos online taunting rival gang members to take their best shot. And they did, but twice when they shot they killed someone else, igniting a panic among people living here who feared they might be next.

It took months to set up the call to Young Pappy, whose real name is Shaquon Thomas. That talk didn't last long before he laid into me, upset I wrote the things the police were saying about him and his street gang.

Find top songs and albums by Young Pappy including Killa, Homicide and more. Listen to music by Young Pappy on Apple Music. Find top songs and albums by Young Pappy including Killa, Homicide and more. 2 Cups: Part 2 of Everything, featuring a remix of fellow Chicagoan Chief Keef’s “Faneto,” just weeks before his murder on May 29, 2015.

'Do you know how you make me look to society?' the then 19-year-old said before abruptly hanging up.

I never got to have a true conversation with Young Pappy. And now, I never will.

Three months later, whoever was shooting at him didn't miss.

Everyone saw it coming — the police, watchful neighbors and reporters, like me. It was just a matter of when.

Police locked up the rapper on any charge that might stick, and they made personal pleas to him, and to his mother, in hopes he would change his ways.

But for years a war raged on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube between Young Pappy's gang and his rivals, often spilling over into reality in spurts of violence that left otherwise quiet neighborhood streets stained with blood. The print shop for mac version 2.

'He got the least of it'

On a cold February day in 2014, I got a call from the newsroom that someone had been shot and I rushed to the scene.

I parked my car on Columbia Avenue and walked up the hill to the crime scene — the McDonald's parking lot at Clark Street and Pratt Boulevard.

Markeyo Carr, 17, was among those shot by a masked gunman. Three more people were hit, including Young Pappy — but I didn't know it at the time.

It wasn't until later that day that a well-placed police source told me detectives believed a certain rapper growing in prominence was likely the target.

Young Pappy got shot in the arm.

His crew — about 20 members of the Insane Cutthroat Gangsters, a faction of the Gangster Disciples — congregated on the corner across the street.

I knew some of them; I turned my camera their way and snapped a few photos. They saw, and cursed at me, threatening to kick my ass.

I believed they would, so I walked across the street where I saw Carr's body covered in a bloody white sheet. His face — tilted to the side — and the toes of his sneakers weren't covered by the blood-stained sheet.

It wasn't until after sundown that his body was removed. His family would later tell me Markeyo was left outside for too long on that frosty night.

The Cook County Medical Examiner determined a gunshot to the back of the head ended his life.

The next morning, I watched as an employee of the McDonald's used shovelfuls of snow and buckets of soap to scrape away the frozen blood left behind.

^{A man scraped blood from the parking lot where Markeyo Carr was gunned down. [DNAinfo/Benjamin Woodard]}

Later, Carr's mother sat at her kitchen table and leafed through condolence letters from friends and teachers who had heard the tragic news.

'The kids wrote stuff about how he's a funny person, about how he'll be missed,' she said. Download qualnet 5.0 free.

The next week, I walked into the now-shuttered pizzeria next door to the McDonald's to confirm a tip that its surveillance cameras captured the shooting.

It was true. The chilling footage shows someone raise a handgun and open fire on Markeyo and the other victims running away.

'I was in shock,' the restaurant's owner, Ashfaq Ahmed, told me about watching the slaying for the first time on the monitor inside his small storefront.

I tracked down Young Pappy to a house on Lakewood Avenue in Edgewater. His dad lived there. My knock on the door went unanswered, but I waited — for about an hour — until a middle-aged man walked out and headed toward Devon Avenue.

I grabbed my notebook and pen and caught up with him.

'He got the least of it, out of all of them,' he told me.

Young Pappy Savages

He also said his son wasn't home; he didn't know where he was.

A week later, Young Pappy resurfaced on social media.

'Im still here,' he tweeted.

'Wet That T-Shirt Up'

On March 26 of last year, Young Pappy was in court on a reckless conduct charge and got sentenced to 60 days in jail.

He got out on June 3.

The ensuing summer was a bloody one.

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In all, 48 people were shot and 14 died in Rogers Park, Edgewater and Uptown in 2014, according to police data.

Young Pappy was back on YouTube disparaging his gang rivals in rap videos — which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views — and began promoting his soon-to-be-released mixtape, '2 Cups Part 2 of Everything.'

The rapper's music was more than entertainment.

Former Rogers Park Police Cmdr. Thomas Waldera called the videos 'technological kerosene,' fueling the gang war raging on the street.

Two months later, on July 13, Conservative Vice Lord Eric Vaughn allegedly handed a gun to a passenger in his car and told him 'Wet that T-Shirt up' when they saw Young Pappy walking down Devon Avenue near his dad's house.

He escaped the gunfire, but an innocent bystander did not.

Wil Lewis, a 28-year-old photographer, was taking photos of the rapper as the gunfire erupted, his friends told me, and he never had a chance.

The volley of bullets that missed Young Pappy struck and killed him.

A city alderman who witnessed the shooting told me he 'heard a series of pops, 'Pop, pop, pop, pop.'

Ald. Joe Moore (49th) said, 'I knew right away that it wasn’t fireworks. It was gunfire.'

Moore said the gunman followed Young Pappy south down Glenwood Avenue, and then spotted Lewis on the ground.

Lewis' wife, Maria, wouldn't talk to me or any other reporter about her husband's murder. The young couple had just moved to the neighborhood when she lost him.

Friends tell me she's trying to move on now, and just returned from a long hike on the Appalachian Trail.

'Good Luck to You'

Early this year, Young Pappy was back in jail.

He got in a fight at the same McDonald's where Markeyo was killed. Police said the fight moved outside and down a side street, Columbia Avenue, when the man he was fighting ended up with a bullet in his leg.

It was the same block where I parked to cover the murder scene nearly a year before.

No one was charged in that shooting, but Young Pappy was slapped with a reckless conduct charge.

A couple of weeks later, I visited Young Pappy's mother, Ingrid Thomas, who lives separately from her ex-husband at the family's Rogers Park home.

I caught up with her as she was leaving for work, warming up her car in an alley parking spot.

Immediately, I recognized the building — the same place Markeyo lived with his mother.

Ingrid Thomas told me her son was talented, smart and misunderstood. She said the police stormed into her apartment with guns drawn to arrest her boy. They spent hours searching for a gun, but never found one.

Standing in the ground-level doorway of the apartment, the wom