Juelz Santana is enjoying his newfound freedom thanks in part to Meek Mill ... and now he wants to give back to the inmates he met while behind bars.
Here's the deal ... Juelz is fresh outta prison after serving 19 months of his 27-month sentence in his airport drug case, and he's got Meek to thank for some smooth sailing.
Our sources tell us Meek helped Juelz by connecting his wife, Kimbella, with a lawyer who helped guide them through the process to ensure everything worked out. Courts and the prison system can be tricky, and we're told Meek wanted to ensure things would work out for Juelz.
The Dipset MC was able to come straight home and skip the halfway house he was originally destined for. Many halfway houses are shut down because of the pandemic.
Juelz is now on supervised release, which, as we first reported, means he'll have to submit to a drug test within 15 days of his release.
Now that he's out, Juelz tells us he wants to give back to inmates by working with non-profits whose missions include overturning sentences for wrongly convicted prisoners. Juelz says he also wants to help people in prison find a platform for the music and movie scripts they write in lockup.
On that same front, Juelz tells us he wrote a ton of new music on the inside, as well as a script for a TV series. He says he's going to get back in the studio Monday, but also wants to take time to focus on his family and make up for the 19 months he spent in prison.
Juelz's wife is happy to have her husband home ... she says it's surreal to have him back, wake up next to him and see him with their kids.
Sounds like Meek's inspired Juelz too ... his wife says she and Juelz will be working on prison reform efforts.
In this clip from next week's "People's Party with Talib Kweli," Kweli and co-host Jasmin Leigh chat with rapper, actress, and radio personality Monie Love on making feminist anthem 'Ladies First' with Queen Latifah.
Full episode arrives on Monday 8/10 at 9AMet/6AMpt.
ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – A woman upset that her Burger King order took too long, leading to a restaurant employee being fatally shot, now faces charges along with her longtime boyfriend, who stands accused of pulling the trigger, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
Ashley Mason was arrested on charges of principal to first-degree murder and aggravated assault with a firearm in connection with the death of 22-year-old Desmond Armond Joshua.
A judge on Thursday ruled Mason to be held on no bond on the murder charge. She also cannot have contact with the victim’s family or witnesses, except her daughter.
Deputies said the shooting happened around 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Burger King on the 7000 block of E. Colonial Drive. Deputies said they found Joshua suffering from a gunshot wound in the parking lot. He was taken to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Mason, 31, was mad about the delay at the drive-thru so she got out of her vehicle and began yelling that she was going to have “her man” come to the restaurant, so an employee refunded her $40 and asked her to leave, records show.
Mason waited in the parking lot in her black sedan for a few minutes, then drove away and returned with a white truck with a man identified as 37-year-old Kelvis Rodriguez-Tormes, who was demanding that Joshua fight him, deputies said.
Deputies said after the witness pulled Rodriguez-Tormes off of Joshua, Rodriguez-Tormes then went to his truck and got the gun, telling Joshua, “You got two seconds before I shoot you.”
Court documents show various witness testimony accuses Mason of pointing a gun in the direction of the fight between the victim and her boyfriend. She is also accused of giving him the gun used in the shooting.
Shortly thereafter, Rodriguez-Tormes shot Joshua before driving away in the white truck while the black sedan also fled, deputies, said.
Joshua was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died.
DENVER (AP) — Prosecutors are investigating whether suburban Denver police officers should face criminal charges for putting four Black girls on the ground and handcuffing two of them after mistakenly suspecting they were riding in a stolen car, a district attorney said Friday.
The incident Sunday attracted national attention after a video of the girls — some in tears — being detained in a parking lot spread on social media.
The traffic stop happened in Aurora, where officers are also being investigated following the death of 23-year-old Elijah McClain after he was placed in a chokehold last year.
In the Sunday incident, officers eventually determined the car carrying the girls, ranging in age from 6 to 17, had the same license plate number as the one they were seeking from another state.
Aurora Police Chief Vanessa Wilson and the department are cooperating with the investigation, 18th Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler said in his announcement. He called the public accounts of the confrontation “very concerning.”
“Everyone is entitled to be treated equally under the law,” he said. “No one is above the law. If our investigation determines that the officers involved committed a crime, I will not hesitate to file charges and prosecute them.”
Brauchler is a Republican and a vocal defender of law enforcement, but earlier this year he criticized members of Aurora’s police department for helping shield an officer found passed out in his patrol car from criminal prosecution for suspected drinking and driving.
Aurora police apologized after the video taken by a bystander showed the girls, with the 17-year-old and a 12-year-old lying on their stomachs with their hands cuffed behind their backs. A 14-year-old girl was lying next to the 6-year-old, also on their stomachs next to the car.
They can be heard crying and screaming as officers stand with their backs to the camera. A woman on the other side of the car is seen being led away in handcuffs.
An officer eventually helped the handcuffed girls sit up but left them with their hands behind their backs, and police eventually determined they had stopped the wrong car. Part of the reason for the mix-up might have been that the car had been reported as stolen earlier in the year, police said.
Driver Brittney Gilliam, who had taken her nieces, sister and daughter out for a day at a nail salon, has characterized the officers’ actions as police brutality.
“There’s no excuse why you didn’t handle it a different type of way,” Gilliam told KUSA-TV. “You could have even told them ‘step off to the side, let me ask your mom or your auntie a few questions so we can get this cleared up.’ There was different ways to handle it.”
Jennifer Wurtz, who shot the video, said on camera that the police drew guns as they initially approached the car.
Bristling at Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s comment that Carlton Weekly was someone who “fancies himself as a rapper, but is also a member of a gang,” family and supporters of FBG Duck returned to the place he was shot to death to call for peace.
“I am asking that his fans, friends of my son, to please not seek retaliation in the death of my son,” said LaSheena Weekly, who has now lost two of her children to gun violence. “As his mother, I want to say please put the guns down, so that the generation of tomorrow can grow and live long and healthy life.”
Twenty-six-year-old Carlton Weekly was gunned down on Chicago's Oak Street Tuesday near the Dolce & Gabbana store. The murder was committed in broad daylight in what witnesses described as a drive-by shooting.
Police are still looking for those responsible.
Despite frequent references to guns and gangs in his music and his videos, Weekly’s family insists he was not a member of a gang.
“To assassinate his character as if he was this gang-banging thug, run around Chicago terrorizing communities, is an outright lie,” LaSheena Weekly said.
Other supporters called him an entertainer who was popular in Drill Music circles.
Chicago police say they appreciate FBG Duck’s family coming forward to call for peace.
“We always worry about the retaliatory shootings,” said Deputy Chief Daniel O’Shea. “Its nice to see the family come out here and call for peace, not just down here on Oak Street, but throughout the city.”
Still, Weekly’s family and their supporters insist that more needs to be done.
Gwendolyn Baxter, founder of the The Sisterhood, a group made of mothers who have lost children to gun violence said he group wants no more killings.
“Let our young kids live,” Baxter said. “Our babies been dying…let our children be able to go outside and play and laugh again.”
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — Body camera videos from a North Carolina jail show a man who died days after his arrest struggling with guards to get up from where he lay on the floor, calling out for his mother and yelling “I can’t breathe!” more than 20 times as they restrained him.
The videos released Wednesday show the moments last December when John Neville, 56, was told by a nurse in the Forsyth County jail in Winston-Salem that he had a seizure. Neville died at a local hospital of a brain injury on Dec. 4, three days after his arrest on a warrant accusing him of assaulting a female.
Five former jail officers and a nurse were charged in July with involuntary manslaughter in Neville’s death.
Body camera video from one of the guards shows the nurse wearing blue surgical gloves kneeling next to Neville, who initially appears to be unresponsive. The nurse repeatedly tells him, “You’re OK,” and asks if he can talk to her.
“Are you ready to come out of it now?” she asks. “It looks like you had a seizure.”
A guard explains that he is having a medical problem and tells him to calm down. He fights to get up and yells expletives, crying “Let me up, let me up. ... Help me. Help me.” At one point, he yells, “Mama, mama!”
A group of four of five guards flips him over to his stomach and cuffs his hands behind his back as he continues to struggle. They put a white mesh hood over his head, stand him up, walk him through a door and strap him into a restraining chair as he moans and breathes heavily.
A guard then pushes him in the chair down several corridors before the roughly 19-minute body camera video ends.
In the second video, which is nearly 26 minutes long, Neville is moved into a small cell. As he is being transferred, Neville yells, “Help me, somebody!” A guard tells him he’s had a medical episode and he needs to calm down.
Once in the cell, the five officers remove Neville from the chair and lay him on a mattress. He yells, “I can’t breathe!” and “Please let me go!” He shouted that he couldn’t breathe at least 25 more times before one guard uses bolt cutters to remove the handcuffs that a key had broken off in.
At one point, a guard acknowledges that the handcuffs belong to him. “That’s coming out of your paycheck,” another guard responds.
Soon, Neville stops yelling, and while officers ask him if he’s OK, no response can be heard on the video. After that, his legs are folded onto his back and he is locked in the room. The officers back out.
The last scene shows the nurse standing at the window and looking at Neville. In a faint voice, the nurse appears to suggest that Neville wasn’t breathing. The guards reenter the cell and the nurse checks on Neville, who lets out an groan. The nurse applies her stethoscope, then tells the guards “I can’t hear a heart rate” and says Neville has to be rolled on his back to be treated. She requests an defibrillator and performs CPR on him.
Neville suffered a brain injury because his heart stopped beating, which deprived his brain of oxygen, according to an autopsy report, which also said he asphyxiated while being restrained.
Mike Grace, an attorney for the Neville family, said the video evoked tears.
“I didn’t know Mr. Neville before his death, and I wept,” Grace said. “My partner didn’t know him, and my partner is a 45-year-old white man and he wept. I wept like a baby.”
Grace said there have been others who didn’t see a problem with the way Neville was treated, but he said it’s that kind of insensitivity that led to his death.
“It was a very definite lack of respect for human dignity, for human life, especially a Black human life in jail,” he said.
Grace described Neville’s death as one of commission, not of omission.
“The video won’t show anyone kicking Mr. Neville or hitting Mr. Neville or actively attacking him,” he said. “They just didn’t give a damn about him, and I don’t know which is worse. It was a life, according to the coroner, that he shouldn’t have died. Didn’t have to die.”
On Tuesday, Forsyth County Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough apologized to Neville’s family during a news conference for the man’s death, saying he too cried after seeing the video. He said Neville’s death has led to changes in training involving medical care providers, and that he would name a portion of the jail for Neville.
There's a distinction between being a rapper and a lyricist. All artists can put together words that rhyme, but very few make you stop the song you're listening to, so you can rewind it to comprehend a slick bar you just heard.
Fred the Godson was an elite lyricist.
Sadly, the Bronx, New York native lost his life on April 23, 2020, at the young age of 35 due to complications of coronavirus.
Thankfully, Fred recorded so much material throughout his career we will get a chance hear more of his music on future projects.
The first posthumous release from Gordo is titled "GodSon." A project which features many of Fred's classic songs. A lot of them you may have missed at the time they were originally released.
"Godson" is now available on all streaming platforms:
1. Intro 2. The Sermon 3. Too Fat 4. Put In Work 5. She Called Me God 6. The City 7. Streets of the Bronx 8. Rush 9. We Gone Fly 10. Money 11. Talkin Bout Money 12. It's All There 13. Can I Live with Jay Pharoah
Black Soprano Family artist Rick Hyde drops off an official music video for "Ricky & Fonz." This is off of the new DJ Drama-hosted Gangsta Grillz project titled "The Respected Sopranos."
CHICAGO (AP) — A convicted felon on parole has been charged with attempted murder in the shooting of three Chicago police officers outside a station, authorities said Friday.
Lovelle Jordan was taken to the station on the city’s northwest side after officers arrested him Thursday in connection with a June 26 carjacking in downtown Chicago, police said.
Jordan began firing when an officer opened the door of the squad car they had driven him to the station in, Deputy Chief Brendan Deenihan said. Officers returned fire and wounded Jordan, who faces six counts of attempted murder as well as charges of possession of a stolen vehicle and possession of a weapon as a felon.
Jordan was still hospitalized Friday and did not appear in court. Prosecutors said he has been paralyzed from the chest down.
Jordan’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Scott Finger, objected to the bond hearing since Jordan could not appear, the Chicago Tribune reported. A judge ordered him held without bail.
Two of the wounded officers were treated and released from the hospital. The third officer was shot in the chin and remains hospitalized but is “doing well,” Deenihan said.
“He’s not out of the woods by any means ... but it appears he’s going to make it,” he said.
Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Kevin DeBoni said during Friday’s court hearing that the officer had been placed in a medically induced coma to prevent damage to his spine.
Police handcuffed Jordan’s hands behind his back when he was arrested, but he apparently was able to move his hands to the front while being transported to the station, Deenihan said.
He said Jordan, 26, was searched before being transported, but police believe he had a gun “extremely secreted, probably very close to his private area” and was able to retrieve the weapon during the ride to the station.
“They didn’t do anything wrong,” Deenihan said of officers who made the arrest. “I will defend them. They’re out there working, they are wrestling with this guy and once again it’s the offender’s action — that’s who’s responsible for shooting the officer in the face.”
In this clip, Godfrey shares his thoughts on Jada Pinkett's relationship with August Alsina and how Will and Jada's "Red Table Talk" episode talking about the situation made Will look bad. Godfrey also predicted that August Alsina will get the most out of the situation, including remixes to his song "Entanglement." He went on to state that Jada Pinkett-Smith treated her "Red Table Talk" episode like a mob boss, which you can hear more about below.
Oakland A's bench coach Ryan Christenson says he "made a mistake" by throwing up a Nazi salute TWICE during Thursday's game against the Rangers ... insisting it was unintentional.
"I made a mistake and will not deny it," Christenson said in a statement.
Christenson made the salute while greeting players in the dugout at the end of the game. You can see pitcher Liam Hendriks trying to correct Christenson's salute into an "elbow bump" position.
But, R.C. eventually went back to the Nazi salute one more time.
Christenson says the whole thing was born out of an attempt to be more COVID-conscious.
"Today in the dugout I greeted players with a gesture that was offensive. In the world today of [COVID-19] I adapted our elbow bump, which we do after wins, to create some distance with the players."
"My gesture unintentionally resulted in a racist and horrible salute that I do not believe in. What I did is unacceptable, and I deeply apologize."
The A's acknowledged the move looked like a Nazi salute and apologized as well.
"We do not support or condone this gesture, or the racist sentiment behind it."
The team added, "This is incredibly offensive, especially in these times when we as a [club] and many others are working to expose and address racial inequities in our country."
2 Chainz chopped it up with The Breakfast Club about his Verzuz battle against Rick Ross, trying to stay creative during the pandemic, new album, respect in hip-hop and more.
Cardi B was the latest guest on The Breakfast Club.
She talks about moving to Los Angeles, working on new album, getting depressed by the pandemic, "WAP" collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion, Breonna Taylor, Joe Biden and much more.
Benny The Butcher brought Black Soprano Family members Heem and Rick Hyde to the Bars On I-95 show to chop it up about anything and everything. Tap in below.
Check out the official music video for "What U Need" by JoJo from the upcoming album good to know (Deluxe) available 8/28. Pre-order here:https://JOJO.lnk.to/goodtoknowdeluxe
Harlem heavyweight rhyme-writer G4 Jag returns with new visuals. "Where You Been" (first premiered via PaperChaseDotCom) has a jazzy musical back-drop (courtesy of Los Angeles beat-duo DirtyDiggs) with video directed by Starz Coleman.
As he posts up in front of his building with his comrades (including q Stilla, Dutch Brown, The Musalini, Emilio Craig, Madhattan, 448 Brad, Huey P, Aaqil Ali, Fligga and 200 Blokks Vaygez Blakk), reflecting over spirits and piff, G4 relates all the work he has put in the booth and in the hood. Though, his visibility in the game has been raised in recent years with his projects like Still Surviving and his work with artists including Flee Lord, Planet Asia and The Musalini his journey begins much further back.
"Where You Been" is taken from G4Jag’s collaborative project with DirtyDiggs entitled "Keep Going" (Presented by The Dough Networkz). Another video from the project "Make a Plate" also recently dropped (Premiere via Weekly Rap Gods).
The project is out now in limited CD edition as well as digital (link below).
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