Murders, Attempted Murders and Homicides

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    The Rapper Silentó Gets 30 Years in Prison for Fatal Shooting of His Cousin

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    The songwriter, whose real name is Ricky Hawk, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and three other charges in relation to the killing.Silentó, the rapper known for his viral hit “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Wednesday after pleading guilty to charges related to the fatal shooting of his cousin.The rapper, whose real name is Ricky Lamar Hawk, pleaded guilty but mentally ill to voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, possessing a firearm while committing a crime and concealing the death of another, District Attorney Sherry Boston of DeKalb County said in a statement.Mr. Hawk, 27, was arrested in connection with the shooting of his cousin, Frederick Rooks III, 34, in the early hours of Jan. 21, 2021, after the police found him bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds in a residential neighborhood in Decatur, Ga., seven miles northeast of Atlanta, according to a police report. Emergency workers pronounced him dead on the scene.Several people nearby heard gunshots, and security footage from doorbell cameras showed a white BMW S.U.V. fleeing the scene a few minutes after the gunfire, according to the district attorney’s office. A relative of Mr. Rooks told officers that he was last seen with Mr. Hawk, who had picked him up in a vehicle that matched the description.After he was taken into custody on Feb. 1, 2021, Mr. Hawk told investigators that he had shot Mr. Rooks, according to the district attorney’s office. Mr. Hawk initially faced a murder charge, which was dropped as part of the plea agreement on Wednesday.His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.On the day of his arrest, Mr. Hawk’s publicist at the time said that he had been “suffering immensely from a series of mental health illnesses” in recent years.Mr. Hawk became famous in 2015 while he was still in high school through his single, “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” which started a social media dance craze. Tutorial videos have millions of views, and the official music video has been watched about 1.9 billion times on YouTube.In 2019, Mr. Hawk went on the interview show “The Doctors” and described his struggles with depression.“Depression doesn’t leave you when you become famous,” he said. “It just adds more pressure.”“I don’t know if I can truly be happy,” he added on the show. “I don’t know if these demons will ever go away.”With a plea of guilty but mentally ill, the state’s Department of Corrections is responsible for evaluating and treating Mr. Hawk’s mental health needs, according to Georgia law. More

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      in Theater

      Sunny Jacobs, a Celebrity After Freed From Death Row, Dies at 77

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      Her story, fashioned into an Off Broadway play and television movies, was later questioned by an investigator in a 2021 book.Sunny Jacobs, a former death row inmate who was convicted of a 1970s double murder in Florida and later freed, becoming a news media celebrity and a leading subject in an acclaimed Off Broadway play and two television movies, died on Tuesday in rural County Galway, Ireland. She was 77.Her death was announced by the Sunny Center, an anti-death penalty nonprofit organization founded by Ms. Jacobs, with locations in Galway and Tampa, Fla. It said she had “passed away after a fire at the Sunny Healing Center.” The circumstances of the fire were not immediately clear.Ms. Jacobs spent nearly 17 years in prison in Florida, five of them on death row, for the murders of two law enforcement officers in February 1976 at a rest stop near Fort Lauderdale.Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire.Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated.It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs’s subsequent, celebrated tale — that she had been an innocent, a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, the Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Jonathan Joss, ‘King of the Hill’ Voice Actor, Is Fatally Shot by Neighbor, Police Say

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      A neighbor in San Antonio who opened fire on the actor during a dispute was charged with murder, the authorities said. Mr. Joss also appeared in “Parks and Recreation.”Jonathan Joss, the actor best known for his voice work on the animated television show “King of the Hill,” was shot and killed by a neighbor on Sunday night during a dispute in San Antonio, the authorities said.Mr. Joss, who was 59, voiced John Redcorn on “King of the Hill” and also appeared in “Parks and Recreation,” “Ray Donovan” and “Tulsa King.”The neighbor, who was identified by investigators as Sigfredo Ceja Alvarez, 56, was taken into custody shortly after the altercation and charged with murder, the San Antonio Police Department said on Monday.The police did not say what had led to the dispute, which happened around 7 p.m. on the south side of San Antonio.But in a post on Mr. Joss’s Facebook page on Monday, his husband, Tristan Kern de Gonzales, described the shooting as a hate crime and said that the two of them had been repeatedly harassed because they were gay. He wrote that they had returned to a property where Mr. Joss’s home had burned down earlier this year when the shooting occurred. “He started yelling violent homophobic slurs at us,” he wrote in a statement. “He then raised a gun from his lap and fired.”Mr. Kern de Gonzales said that he and Mr. Joss had reported the harassment several times in the past to the authorities, but that it had continued.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Johnny Rodriguez, Country Music Star, Dies at 73

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      He was best known for the 1970s hits “I Just Can’t Get Her Out of My Mind” and “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico,” and as the first popular Mexican American country artist.Johnny Rodriguez, who became the first Mexican American country music star with a string of hits, died on Friday. He was 73.His daughter, Aubry Rodriguez, announced his death on social media on Saturday. The post did not cite a cause of death.Mr. Rodriguez rose to fame in the 1970s and was best known for the hits “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico” and “You Always Come Back (to Hurting Me).” He released six singles that reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, and nine others reached the Top 10.In 2007, Mr. Rodriguez was inducted into the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame, which described him as the “greatest and most memorable Chicano Country singer of all time.”Juan Raoul Davis Rodriguez was born on Dec. 10, 1951, in Sabinal, Texas, around 65 miles west of San Antonio. A list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Rodriguez, the second youngest of 10 children, started playing guitar at the age of 7 when his older brother, Andres, bought him one. Their father died of cancer when Mr. Rodriguez was 16, around the same time Mr. Rodriguez formed a band, and Andres died the next year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Joan Didion Knew the Stories We’d Tell About the Manson Murders

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      Didion’s influential account of the era, “The White Album,” captures the ripples of terror provoked by the 1969 murders.Few true crime villains dominate American imaginations as fiercely as Charles Manson and his “family” of lost youths. The story has everything: a wild-eyed mastermind who was also a failed rocker; a coterie of emaciated, beautiful women; the death of a gorgeous pregnant actress and her friends; strange links to the Beatles; a feeling that this murder was either random, or an indication that hell had broken loose on earth.Plus, the public has always had the nagging sense that there was more to the story than anyone was letting on. It was just too Satanic-seeming. Too weird.So no wonder the 1969 murders have been an ongoing source of fascination. In just the past few years, Quentin Tarantino’s film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story: Cult” and Emma Cline’s novel “The Girls” have become bona fide hits by reimagining the murders. Manson has turned up as a character in shows like “Aquarius,” “Mindhunter” and “Charlie Says.” The journalist Tom O’Neill’s gobsmacking book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the C.I.A. and the Secret History of the Sixties,” from 2019, chronicled the author’s decades-long investigation into the case, with results that upend most of what we think we know. And now it’s a Netflix documentary from the director Errol Morris.A still from “Chaos: The Manson Murders,” a Netflix documentary by Errol Morris.NetflixSomehow, this case keeps surprising us. But one person who regarded it without shock — as if it was the inevitable conclusion of a panicked era — was Joan Didion, who was living and working in Hollywood when the murders occurred. In her 1978 essay “The White Album,” regarded as a seminal account of the era, she writes about the ripples of terror the murders provoked. “These early reports were garbled and contradictory,” with differ­ent numbers of victims and explanations of what happened, Didion writes. “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”Reality was barely tangible in the summer of 1969, with its highs and lows, its muddled impressions and half-understood head­lines. Cause and effect seemed to be breaking apart. In some respects this was simply the inevitable result of a country becoming saturated in images because they had a screen at home. A movie theater was a place to go if you wanted to see a whole story, beginning to end. But a TV you could turn on and off, and you never knew what would be there when you turned it on again. You might see images from My Lai, the funeral of a slain politician, pop versions of cowboys on “Gunsmoke” or “Bonanza,” smil­ing tap dancers on a variety show, some comedian or singer from your youth in a different setting than you remembered. It mirrored the neurons of a disturbed mind, firing at random.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      YSL Trial Ends With Final Defendants Acquitted of Murder and Gang Charges

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      The winding, yearslong case against the star Atlanta rapper Young Thug, who recently pleaded guilty to gang charges, and five others concluded on Tuesday.Shannon Stillwell, left, and Deamonte Kendrick were found not guilty of murder and conspiracy to violate the RICO act.Miguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressMiguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe two remaining defendants in the gang conspiracy and racketeering case against YSL, the Atlanta rap label that prosecutors said doubled as a violent street crew led by Young Thug, were found not guilty on Tuesday of murder and conspiracy to violate the RICO act.The verdict ended a winding trial that became the longest in Georgia history. It arrived nearly two years after jury selection began and followed a year of testimony from close to 200 witnesses and nearly 16 hours of deliberations spread across four days.Young Thug, the platinum-selling rapper born Jeffery Williams, accepted a guilty plea on Oct. 31 and was released from jail after being sentenced to time served and 15 years of strict probation. As the case limped toward its conclusion in recent weeks, three other defendants also negotiated plea deals amid chaotic proceedings.Yet two of the original six men on trial — Deamonte Kendrick, known as the rapper Yak Gotti, and Shannon Stillwell, also known as Shannon Jackson — said they rejected similar deals with prosecutors, opting to leave their fate to jurors in Fulton County, Ga.On Tuesday, Mr. Kendrick and Mr. Stillwell were acquitted of the 2015 murder of Donovan Thomas Jr., an alleged gang rival, and also found not guilty of participating in criminal street gang activity and conspiracy to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO. Mr. Stillwell was also acquitted of a second murder, but he was found guilty of a single count: possessing a firearm as a felon.The judge in the case, Paige Reese Whitaker, was required to sentence Mr. Stillwell to the maximum sentence for the gun charge — 10 years in prison — because of recidivism guidelines. But she opted to convert all but two of those years to probation while also crediting Mr. Stillwell with time served.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Lottery to Be Held for Coveted Seats at Menendez Brothers Hearing

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      The court is expecting high demand and has announced a public lottery for a limited number of seats at a status hearing in Los Angeles on Monday.What’s one of the most exclusive tickets in Los Angeles? It may not be what you think.A lottery is being held on Monday to determine who will be the 16 people who get to witness what happens next in the case of the Menendez Brothers, who are serving life sentences for murdering their parents in 1989.The drawing will take place between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Pacific time, in front of the Van Nuys Courthouse West, the Superior Court of Los Angeles County said. The seats for 16 people, in a county of more than 10 million residents, will be allocated just one hour before the status hearing is set to begin at 10:30 a.m.The court occasionally holds public lotteries “when seating is limited and public interest is high,” a court spokesperson said in an email.The high level of interest in the case is in part spurred by a new series as well as a new documentary on Netflix that detail the brothers’ abuse allegations against their parents. Erik and Lyle Menendez killed their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, more than 35 years ago in their Beverly Hills mansion.The Menendez brothers were found guilty of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. At the time, the judge said that he sentenced each brother to two consecutive life sentences because they had carefully decided to kill their parents.In the almost three decades since, the public perception of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were 21 and 18 when they committed the murders, has shifted somewhat. Many have shown their interest in the murders in social media posts, and have often pushed for the brothers’ release, with the renewed attention earning them a new class of defenders.Last month, the Los Angeles County district attorney, George Gascón, said he would request that the brothers be resentenced, which could ultimately lead to their release.“I came to a place where I believe that under the law, resentencing is appropriate,” said Mr. Gascón, who has since lost his seat.The brothers could also find freedom through clemency from California’s governor, for which they have petitioned. Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he would hold off on considering that request until the new district attorney, Nathan Hochman, takes office early next month and has had a chance to review the case. More

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      in Movies

      The Best True Crime to Stream: The Fame Monster

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      Across television, film and podcasting, here are four picks that explore lesser-discussed crimes involving celebrities.There is an absolute glut of true crime content that involves the rich and famous. These stories also tend to be rehashed and retread because fame breeds fascination, of course, and name recognition helps when seeking the eyes and ears of an audience. But there are plenty of stories involving stars that are just as compelling even if they haven’t gotten the same attention. Here are four of them across television, podcast and film.Documentary film“Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara”The harsh realities of toxic fan culture have gotten more attention in 2024, with pop stars like Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish speaking more openly about the ubiquitousness of harassment and obsession that accompany fame.For this new documentary, the director Erin Lee Carr (“Mommy Dead and Dearest,” “At The Heart of Gold”) weaves together two sides of a shocking story that turned the lives of Tegan and Sara Quin, twin sisters who are the queer folk-pop duo Tegan and Sara, upside down.In the 1990s and 2000s, the sisters had a knack for building community at shows and online, with Tegan in particular feeling a responsibility to their fans. When this familiarity dovetailed with a catfishing scheme, Tegan and many fans became ensnared in a sophisticated identity theft operation that lasted over 15 years. “Fake Tegan systematically destroyed my life,” Tegan says at one point.As layers are peeled back, a more complex picture comes into focus. Unfortunately, the end brings little comfort, only underscoring the magnitude of the discoveries made along the way.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Italian City in Amanda Knox Case Wants to Move On. A New Series Won’t Let It.

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      When a show produced by Ms. Knox about the murder of Meredith Kercher was filmed in Perugia, an outcry by residents led the mayor to apologize.Seventeen years after Amanda Knox, the American exchange student, was arrested and charged with killing her roommate in Perugia, a picturesque university city in central Italy, some of its citizens are outraged that their city is once again being dragged into a tragedy that they would prefer to forget.This month, when cast and crew arrived there for a two-day shoot for a Hulu series about the case — a show for which Ms. Knox and Monica Lewinsky are executive producers — Mayor Vittoria Fernandi felt obliged to write a heartfelt letter of apology to the city for the hurt caused by their presence.One resident, honoring the memory of Meredith Kercher, the slain roommate, draped a sheet from a balcony with “Respect for Meredith” painted in bold red letters. A council member questioned on social media whether the mayor should have allowed the production to shoot in Perugia, where the crime has long overshadowed the city’s “history, art and beauty.”An editorial in the daily newspaper La Nazione wrote, “Perhaps Meredith and Perugia would have deserved more respect without having to sacrifice the dignity of a murdered student and a brutalized city to business.”It hardly mattered that after spending four years in prison, Ms. Knox was acquitted for the death of Ms. Kercher, a 21-year-old student from England who was murdered in the house they shared.People forget “that she, too, is a victim in this case,” said Luca Luparia Donati, the director of the Italy Innocence Project, who is representing Ms. Knox in a slander case.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More