Bay Area rapper wounded in shooting at Hollywood recording studio, LAPD says
A Bay Area rapper was shot after refusing to turn over his watch during an armed robbery late Thursday inside an East Hollywood recording studio, according to police and sources.
Stacey Gilton, who raps under the name "Lil Yee," suffered two gunshot wounds to the chest when an assailant interrupted the performer's recording session and demanded his watch, according to an LAPD source who requested anonymity in order to discuss an open case.
Gilton was taken to an area hospital for surgery and his condition was critical but stable, the source said.
An LAPD spokesman, Officer Drake Madison, said police were flagged down and directed to the scene of the shooting just after 10 p.m. Thursday in the 4500 block of Melrose Avenue. They found the victim, 32, wounded by a suspect who had "fired several rounds at the victim during an attempted robbery," Madison said in a statement.
Read more: Arthur 'King Bobalouie' Moses, who led one of first L.A. Bloods gang sets and sang backup for Delfonics, dies
Officers obtained a brief description of the suspect — a Black male in his mid to late 20s — who fled the scene in a vehicle in an unknown direction. No arrests had been announced as of early Friday afternoon in the shooting, which police said was not motivated by any gang rivalries.
Police are said to be investigating the possibility that the robbery was a set-up orchestrated by another rapper.
Gilton is a native of the Fillmore neighborhood in San Francisco, proudly touting his roots in a 2022 interview on influential music journalist Jeff Weiss' website. According to the interview, he self-released hit single "War" in 2016; it has racked up nearly 5 million streams on Spotify.
Gilton credited the song with giving him "a platform. It gave me a fanbase" who connected with lyrics about wrestling with grief and mental health.
The shooting is the latest in a string of high-profile shootings and robberies of musical artists.
Local icon Nipsey Hussle was murdered outside his clothing boutique in South L.A. in 2019.
In February 2020, rising star Pop Smoke was gunned down in a home invasion after inadvertently posting his location in the Hollywood Hills on Instagram while in town visiting from New York.
And in 2022, three rappers — PnB Rock (born Rakim Allen), Compton's Kee Riches (Kian Nellum) and Inglewood's Half Ounce (Latauriisha O'Brien) — were killed in the L.A. area.
Earlier this week, TMZ reported that Le Vaughn — an influencer and the former boyfriend of 'Gucci Flip Flops' rapper Bhad Bhabie — was shot in the hand during an altercation at a strip club near downtown L.A.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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24 Vibrant Pride Products To Show Your Support
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San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
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Political violence is threaded through recent US history. The motives and justifications vary
The assassination of one Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes, is just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States. The list, in the past two months alone: the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. The firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages, and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania's governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside. And here's just a sampling of some other disturbing attacks before that — the assassination of a health care executive on the streets of New York City late last year, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in small-town Pennsylvania during his presidential campaign last year, the 2022 attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories, and the 2017 shooting by a liberal gunman at a GOP practice for the congressional softball game. 'We've entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,' said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies extremism. 'A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.' Politics behind both individual shootings and massacres Politics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews were trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right that support Trump's push to limit immigration. The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Islamic State group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police. 'You're seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,' said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. 'It feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.' The United States has a long and grim history of political violence, from presidential assassinations dating back to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln to lynchings and violence aimed at Black people in the South to the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the past few years, however, have likely reached a level not seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when icons like Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Ware noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has shuttered units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally. 'We're at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,' Ware said. 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Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as fliers for the day's anti-Trump parades. Conservatives online seized on the fliers — and the fact that Boetler had apparently once been appointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — to claim the suspect must be a liberal. 'The far left is murderously violent,' billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X. It was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker's then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: 'Where is Nancy?!' On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. 'All of us must remember that it's not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,' she wrote. Trump had mocked the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, but on Saturday he joined in the official bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them 'horrific violence.' The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric towards his political opponents, who he routinely calls 'sick' and 'evil,' and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests. The Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration's immigration operations in Los Angeles during the past week, when he pledged to 'HIT' disrespectful protesters and warned of a 'migrant invasion' of the city. 'It feels as if the extremists are in the saddle," he said, 'and the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.'
