Did Seattle brothers live and die by their rap lyrics?
Aug 3, 2011, 4:35 AM | Updated: Oct 10, 2012, 7:28 am
Image from Ondrell Harding's MySpace page. (Image courtesy of MySpace)
(Image courtesy of MySpace)
Ondrell Harding raps of drugs, sex and the street life. In a song titled “The Doe Coy,” an ode to his hip-hop personae “Doe Boy,” the 21-year-old aspiring rapper from Seattle calls himself a “coldblooded killer.” While he wouldn’t be the first rapper to embellish his street cred, Seattle police believe Harding lives the life his lyrics portray.
On July 26, Harding was arrested for the South Seattle beating death of 51-year-old Anthony Leroy Matthews. While he hasn’t been formally charged, the arrest was particularly notable given that his younger brother had just died in a hail of bullets. He, too, was a suspected murderer.
Kenneth Harding, 19, was also an aspiring rapper. According to his mother, Denika Chatman, he wanted to follow in his older brother’s footsteps.
“He often appears on a lot of his brother’s songs and he also performs with his brother,” she said at a press conference.
But, the younger Harding would die before ever getting the recording contract his mother said he was after. He was killed on July 16 in a shootout with the San Francisco Police Department. Before his death, Harding was a “person of interest” in the Seattle shooting death of 19-year-old Tanaya Gilbert, who was pregnant at the time.
As she held a press conference to seek answers in her son’s death, Chatman was adamant that Kenneth wasn’t a hardened criminal.
“He had been raised in church all of his life,” she told Bay-area reporters. “He grew up in private Christian school.”
But if Kenneth’s upbringing was anything like Ondrell’s, the school-boy personae would seem to be a bit far-fetched.
In a 700-word bio on his MySpace page, Ondrell calls himself a “proud product of his environment.” He writes that he grew up living the street life and was “fulltime gang bangin and hustlin” by the sixth grade. But, his lyrics went far beyond street crime – to full-blown murder.
“I will kill a man,” he raps in a song of the same name.
The family’s lawyer, Adante Pointer, told the San Francisco Examiner that the lyrics are nothing more than “social commentary.”
