On the night he died, rapper Pop Smoke held a private party at the $2.5 million home he leased from Real Housewife of Beverly Hills star Teddi Mellencamp.
The 20-year-old Brooklyn drill rapper, real name Bashar Jackson, had signed the lease a month before he was gunned down inside the house by four masked home invaders at 4:29 a.m. on Feb. 19.
10 days after his death, the LAPD have hit a roadblock, unable to identify the four suspects seen on surveillance video entering the house on the 2000 block of Hercules Drive in Los Angeles.
About 20 people attended a party at the home to celebrate Pop Smoke’s recent album release. But detectives say they have no leads due to a lack of witnesses.
Law enforcement tell TMZ that people are unwilling to talk about what they saw.
The potential witnesses cops have spoken to keep changing their stories, or telling outright lies. To make matters worse, cops wasted precious hours viewing videos online that turned out to have no connection to the case.
One Instagram blog with thousands of followers posted surveillance footage that purportedly showed the shooting inside the house. But the video turned out to be footage from a deadly home invasion in Gwinnett County, Georgia.
Cops are having trouble coming up with a motive for the murder. Adding to their frustration, the victim lived in Brooklyn, but spent time on the West Coast. Which means cops have had to spend extra time tracking down witnesses who returned to the East Coast.
Pop Smoke was not a household name when he died, but his murder boosted sales of his music, including his 2019 breakout hit “Welcome to the Party.”
For two days after his death, Hercules Drive was lined with TV trucks and fans paying tribute to the drill rapper.
When a reporter visited on Friday afternoon, the street was all but empty, except for two construction workers painting a house nearby.
“It was impossible for a few days,” one neighbor told reporter Tarpley Hitt, of theDailyBeast.com. “But now it seems weirdly normal.”
While Hitt canvased the neighborhood looking for witnesses, three young girls drove up to the cream colored house, taking pictures of the small shrine that included flowers and a crumpled dollar bill.
“We love him,” one of the girls told Hitt. “We only heard about him when he died, from the Internet.”
