Atlanta rapper Silentó gets 30 years after pleading guilty to killing his cousin

DECATUR, Ga. (AP) — Silentó, the Atlanta rapper known for his hit song “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” pleaded guilty but mentally ill Wednesday to voluntary manslaughter and other charges in the 2021 shooting death of his 34-year-old cousin.

The 27-year-old rapper, whose legal name is Ricky Lamar Hawk, was sentenced to 30 years in prison, DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston said in a statement.

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.

DeKalb County police found Frederick Rooks III shot in the leg and face in the early morning hours of Jan. 21, 2021 outside a home in a suburban area near Decatur. Police said the found 10 bullet casings near Rooks’ body, and security video from a nearby home showed a white BMW SUV speeding away shortly after the gunshots.

A family member of Rooks told police that Silentó had picked up Rooks in a white BMW SUV, and GPS data and other cameras put the vehicle at the site of the shooting.

Silentó confessed about 10 days later after he was arrested, police said. Ballistics testing matched the bullet casings to a gun that Silentó had when he was arrested, authorities said.

Rooks’ brothers and sisters told DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Courtney L. Johnson before sentencing that Silentó 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. Silentó 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,” Silentó 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.”

Silentó 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, Silentó 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, Silentó was arrested after police said they clocked him driving 143 miles per hour (230 kilometers per hour) on Interstate 85 in DeKalb County.

Hudson said at the time of Silentó’s arrest in the killing of Rooks that he had been “suffering immensely from a series of mental health illnesses.”