Silentó, the rapper known for “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges related to his cousin’s death in 2021.
The 27-year-old Atlanta rapper, whose legal name is Ricky Lamar Hawk, pleaded guilty but mentally ill Wednesday to voluntary manslaughter and other charges in the shooting death of his 34-year-old cousin. Hawk also pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, possessing a gun while committing a crime and concealing the death of another. A murder charge was dropped as part of the plea agreement.
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In the early morning hours on Jan. 21, 2021, the DeKalb County Police Department found Hawk’s cousin, Frederick Rooks III, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, with 10 bullet casings found near his body. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Security camera footage from a nearby home showed a white BMW SUV fleeing the area minutes after the gunfire. Officers were able to confirm that the vehicle was the same one that Hawk used to pick up Rooks, according to the DeKalb County District Attorney’s office.
Hawk was taken into custody on Feb. 1, 2021, and during an interview with investigators, he admitted to shooting Rooks. Ballistics testing matched the bullet casings to a gun that Hawk had when he was arrested, authorities said.
Rooks’ brothers and sisters told DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Courtney L. Johnson before sentencing that Hawk should have gotten a longer sentence, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
The rapper was a high school junior in suburban Atlanta in 2015 when he released “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)” and watched it skyrocket into a dance craze. Hawk made multiple other albums, but said in an interview with the medical talk show “The Doctors” in 2019 that he struggled with depression and had grown up in a family where he witnessed mental illness and violence.
“I’ve been fighting demons my whole life, my whole life,” he said in 2019.
“Depression doesn’t leave you when you become famous, it just adds more pressure,” Hawk said then, urging others to get help. “And while everybody’s looking at you, they’re also judging you.”
“I don’t know if I can truly be happy, I don’t know if these demons will ever go away.”
Hawk had been struggling in the months before the arrest. His publicist, Chanel Hudson, has said he had tried to kill himself in 2020.
In August 2020, he was arrested in Santa Ana, California, on a domestic violence charge. The next day, the Los Angeles Police Department charged him with assault with a deadly weapon after witnesses said he entered a home, where he didn’t know anyone, looking for his girlfriend and swung a hatchet at two people before he was disarmed.
In October 2020, Hawk was arrested after police said they clocked him driving 143 miles per hour on Interstate 85 in DeKalb County.
Hudson said at the time of Hawk’s arrest in the killing of Rooks that he had been “suffering immensely from a series of mental health illnesses.”