Silentó, the Atlanta rapper best known for the viral 2015 hit “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” was sentenced to 30 years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty but mentally ill in the 2021 shooting death of his cousin in Georgia.
The rapper, real name Ricky Lamar Hawk, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter of his cousin, Frederick Rooks III, in addition to aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during commission of a crime and concealing a death, DeKalb County Dist. Atty. Sherry Boston said in a statement.
Hawk, 27, confessed to the killing when police took him into custody about 10 days after Rooks, 34, was found in the wee hours on Jan. 21, 2021, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, Boston said. Emergency medical workers pronounced him dead at the scene, the statement said.
Video and GPS evidence tied Hawk to the crime, Boston said. A relative of Rooks told authorities that the victim had last been seen with Hawk.
The day Hawk was arrested, his then-publicist Chanel Hudson posted a note asking for prayers for her client and explaining that in recent years he had “been suffering immensely from a series of mental health illnesses” and would continue his “efforts of treatment.”
In 2016, Hawk was nominated under his stage name for the BET Awards’ YoungStars Award along with Amandla Stenberg, Quvenzhané Wallis, Willow Smith and Yara Shahidi. The honor went to Stenberg, the actor famous for playing Rue in the movie “The Hunger Games.”
Hawk went on the syndicated show “The Doctors” in 2019 wearing a sparkling, Michael Jackson-style jacket and talked about how he was born with “all type of drugs” in his system and had felt depressed his whole life. He moved in with a great aunt in 2014, he said, and was prescribed ADHD medication without an ADHD diagnosis. Viral fame came a few years later.
“Depression doesn’t leave you when you become famous,” Hawk said on the show, which positioned him as a brave inspiration to his peers with mental illness. “It just adds more pressure. And while everybody’s looking at you, they’re also judging you.”
Things took a dark turn next, however, with Hawk getting arrested in Southern California in late summer 2020 on domestic violence allegations of inflicting corporal punishment on a spouse or cohabitant in Santa Ana.
Then, while out on bail for that incident the first week of September 2020, he was arrested again in Los Angeles and charged with two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon (not a firearm) after he allegedly entered the Valley Village home of two strangers and threatened them with a hatchet.
As of Thursday that case was still ongoing in Los Angeles County Superior Court with the next hearing scheduled for September. The assistant district attorney handling that case did not reply immediately to The Times’ request for an update.
Also Thursday, nine years after it dropped, Silentó’s music video for “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)” was in the neighborhood of 2 billion views on YouTube.
“Remember when at one point this was playing in every single car around the world,” one commenter said four years ago. It was unclear whether that was posted before or after Rooks was killed.
