Silentó, the rapper behind the 2015 viral hit “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for the fatal 2021 shooting of his cousin.
On Wednesday, the 27-year-old Atlanta-based artist, real name Ricky Hawk, pleaded guilty but mentally ill to voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, possessing a gun while committing a crime and concealing the death of another.
As part of his plea deal, another murder charge was dropped.
Silentó was 23 when he was arrested by DeKalb County police and charged with the murder of his 34-year-old cousin, Frederick Roots III, in January 2021.
At the time, police responded to a report of a person shot outside a home in a suburban area near Decatur, Georgia. When they arrived, they found Roots bleeding heavily from multiple gunshot wounds. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said they found 10 bullet casings near Rooks’s 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.
Silentó 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.”
He added: “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 with his mental health in the months before the arrest. His publicist, Chanel Hudson, has said he had tried to kill himself in 2020.
The rapper was arrested twice in 2020 — once following an incident involving a hatchet and another time on reckless driving charges.
Additional reporting by The Associated Press
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