Six gunmen in two cars waited for Mikquale Cooper outside a BP station in Fuller Park and opened fire when he got back to his car. A witness counted more than a hundred shots. He was 22, he rapped as BloodHound Q50, and a week later nobody has been arrested.
What happened at the gas station
It was about 4 a.m. on Sunday, September 13, on Wentworth Avenue on the South Side.
Cooper was inside the store with a female friend. Two masked men pulled up in a black Infiniti. Four more arrived in a Honda Accord. When Cooper came out and got into his white Tesla, the men got out and fired into the car.
He was hit in the chest and shoulder and taken to University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
A coordinated ambush
Six people. Two vehicles. A coordinated wait outside a store at four in the morning.
That is not an argument that escalated. Somebody knew where he would be and brought enough people to make sure it worked. Chicago police have made no arrests and the investigation is open. It is worth reading alongside what the justice system can actually prove, because an unsolved case and an unprovable one end the same way for a family.
The coverage gap
A 22-year-old rapper was ambushed by six shooters in a major American city and it barely registered outside Chicago and hip-hop press. We did not cover it either, and that is worth admitting in the piece rather than quietly fixing.
There is a well-worn pattern with drill artists killed young. The coverage that does appear tends to be about the genre rather than the person, and the case goes cold while think pieces argue about lyrics.
The BeezLoop Take
We are not going to speculate about motive, and we would treat anyone who does this week with suspicion. No arrests means no charges, no charges means no evidence anybody outside CPD has seen, and the rush to explain these killings through a rapper’s catalog is how they stop being investigated as homicides and start being treated as inevitabilities.
Our position is about the arrest rate, not the music. Chicago’s clearance rate for homicides has sat well below half for years, which means most families in this city get what Cooper’s family has right now: a funeral and an open case. Six shooters in two cars is a lot of people to identify, a lot of phones, a lot of vehicles on a lot of cameras. If this one goes unsolved, it will not be because it was unsolvable.
What we would say plainly: a 22-year-old was killed and the public conversation moved on inside of a week. He was somebody’s kid. The volume of the coverage should track the violence of the act, and it did not. We have looked before at how gun violence patterns are shifting even as overall rates fall, and ambush killings are the part that is not improving.
What to watch
Whether CPD releases vehicle descriptions or surveillance stills. In ambush cases with multiple vehicles, that is usually the step that breaks it open, and its absence a week in is not a good sign.
Sources: Chicago Sun-Times · ABC7 Chicago · TMZ
