In an exclusive with Rolling Stone, more details about the 2018 shooting of Jaylin Craig at a Walmart involving DaBaby is now coming to light.
According to Rolling Stone 11 days prior to the rapper signing with Interscope records he took the life of Jaylin Craig who was a fan of his music according to the family of the young man.
Rolling Stone said at the time, the rapper was a few years shy of global fame, whether for a steady stream of chart-topping songs and Grammy nominations, various brawls.
In 2018, DaBaby, whose real name is Jonathan Kirk, was just another buzzy, cocky North Carolina artist who relied on a local fan base to pass around his YouTube videos and SoundCloud links in the hopes of landing a major record label.
Jaylin Craig was one such listener.
Being an early admirer of Kirk cost the 19-year-old his life, according to his family, after a chance encounter at a Charlotte-area Walmart ended with Kirk shooting and killing Craig on Nov. 5, 2018.
Kirk has always claimed he acted out of fear for his and his family’s safety, describing a scenario where he was approached by two young men who allegedly threatened him and whipped out a firearm while he was shopping with his then-partner and their children.
Kirk claimed he fired his own gun in an act of self-protection and to keep his family safe.
Rolling Stone has obtained never-before-seen security footage of the fatal altercation that appears to contradict key aspects of Kirk’s version of events.
From the footage, the rapper appears to be the initial aggressor in the situation, calling into question DaBaby’s self-defense claim.
To Craig’s family, the video footage raises some serious questions; most important, would Jaylin Craig still be alive if Kirk hadn’t thrown the first punch?
“I feel like they just swept it up under the rug,” Craig’s mother, LaWanda Horsley, tells Rolling Stone of the investigation into her son’s death.
“[Kirk] knows what he did.
I’m not doing this for no fame or anything, because at the end of the day, Jaylin Craig is gone.”
Craig’s family members and his best friend, Henry Douglas, claim the altercation only started when Kirk became annoyed that the teens had recognized him, and he allegedly demanded they take things outside for a fight.
While Kirk claimed to police that one of the teens had first suggested they should fight, the footage shows Craig standing nearby as Kirk sucker punches a blindsided Douglas, barreling into him and striking him in the face.
The injury left Douglas with a bruised eye socket and a gash in his forehead that required stitches.
At one point immediately after Kirk’s initial attack on Douglas, Craig appears in one block of footage to pull out a gun from his waistband, but as he walks out of frame, he appears to begin to put it back.
Other footage from later on in the fight, in which it’s unclear whether or not Craig is still brandishing his gun, then shows Kirk pulling out a concealed Glock from his waistband and mortally wounding Craig.
Officials later determined, based on the security footage, witness testimony, and a weapon found near Craig’s body, that Craig had a gun on him, but it’s inconclusive if Craig was brandishing the gun as he approached the two men.
The whole altercation lasted less than a minute and ended with a wounded Craig running into a nearby aisle and leaving a trail of blood before collapsing in the same spot where medics would pronounce him dead minutes later.
Kirk has hardly shied away from the events of that fateful Monday evening, in fact bragging about the shooting on several tracks.
In the 2020 hit “Rockstar,” he boasts about his one-year-old daughter having witnessed him kill someone, hailing her as a gangster.
(“My daughter a G, she saw me kill a nigga in front of her before the age of two.”) Four days after Craig’s death, Kirk released a video for his new song “No Tears,” compiling local news footage of the mayhem for the song’s intro, with lyrics mentioning the shooting, despite the case still being under investigation.
“And any nigga, touch me, catch a body like Boosie. Try me, I’m shootin’. No back and forth, just up it, I’m blowin’.” (A rep for the rapper did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Outside of his music, Kirk has been more tight-lipped on specifics.
He has always maintained that he acted in self-defense; a loving father protecting his then-partner Mariah Osborne and their two young children while the family was shopping for winter clothes.
He claimed to police that Craig and Douglas had been eyeing him up and lurking in nearby aisles until they finally approached him, allegedly threatening him and brandishing a gun, leading Kirk to draw his own weapon and shoot, killing Craig.
“Daughter could have got hit, son could have got hit [and] me,” DaBaby claimed in an Instagram video days after the shooting. “Lawyers … telling me not to say nothing … But two [people] walk down on you and your whole … family, threatening y’all, whip out [a gun] on y’all, let me see what y’all going to do.”
The case was closed in June 2019. Kirk wasn’t prosecuted for Craig’s death, but was charged and convicted of carrying a concealed weapon and sentenced to 12 months’ probation with a suspended jail sentence.
while Kirk’s fans may have moved on, Craig’s family has not. Four years after his death, his relatives have adopted a street in his honor in Charlotte, as the family is still trying to make sense of how Kirk was able to get off relatively scot-free for the killing.
Still living in Charlotte, Horsley suffers from anxiety, learning of her son’s death when she was sent a graphic image being shared on social media of Craig lying lifeless on the ground next to a pool of blood.
She steers clear of anything related to Kirk, saying that she finds him and his music triggering.
Before the death of Craig, her third child, she shopped every week at the same Walmart where he was shot dead. Today, she can’t even drive past the location without suffering an anxiety attack.
“I kind of stay at home,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I don’t go to the mall; I don’t do anything.
I quit going to events. If I know I have no control in the music, I don’t go.”
Jaylin’s father, Curtis, who works as a truck driver, says he and his son were inseparable.
He has trouble understanding how his son wound up dead, with Kirk claiming the 19-year-old had been looking to cause trouble. “My son wasn’t even like that,” he says. “He wasn’t even ‘gangster.’ We didn’t raise them like that.”
Horsley, Curtis, and other family members all believe Craig’s killing was unjustified, yet their story has largely gone unheard.
It’s not because they were trying to stay under the radar; during Kirk’s trial for the concealed-weapon charge, Horsley and Curtis turned up to court to speak with local outlets in the hope of sharing their son’s story.
They disputed the unfounded rumor that Craig had attempted to rob Kirk, and claimed it was the rapper who had started the altercation by throwing the first punch, only to see their quotes whittled down to a line or two and, in multiple cases, Craig’s name misspelled.
(Even the death-investigation report prepared by Mecklenburg County Assistant District Attorney William Bunting misspelled Craig’s name throughout the six-page document.)
Kirk destroyed their family, Horsley says, but it took all these years before anyone came to them asking for their side of the story.
“We never hid from nobody,” she explains. “We never [heard] from nobody. Y’all knew our names from a news clip. But nobody ever asked us what was Jaylin like. Nobody.”
“This is stressing me out right now because every time you turn on the radio, you hear him,” Curtis adds.
“You can’t even listen to the radio. I think about my son constantly. We all are going through the same stuff.
Every time we talk about it, we think we are getting somewhere, and nobody is trying to help us.
Every lawyer we talked to, they look into this case [and say] ‘OK, we are going to get back with you.’ We don’t hear nothing [back].”
Then there was Kirk seemingly crowing about the shooting in his music.
After “No Tears,” he released a video for “Walker Texas Ranger” in January 2019, where he fights with a Black man whose hair is braided similarly to Craig’s, followed by the release of “Leave Me Alone (Freestyle),” on which he raps “The last nigga played, he no longer here, goddamn.” By the end of the month, 11 weeks after Kirk had killed Craig, Interscope Records announced a deal with the rapper.
It sickened Craig’s family to watch Kirk seemingly launch a career off the back of their son’s death.
But until last spring, they could only go on their faith in their son’s character and the word of Douglas, who insisted that Kirk instigated the fight.
After years of pleading with Huntersville Police and the district attorney’s office, as well as being bounced around different departments, Horsley was finally handed the entire police file pertaining to Craig’s case in April 2021.
It took days for Horsley to sift through the hefty white binder filled with various reports alongside dozens of videos and audio recordings connected to the case.
But nestled among the videos was a clip that changed everything in the family’s eyes. Because to them, it’s proof that the full truth of what actually happened has never been told.
Henry Douglas learned that his best friend since fourth grade was dead a day before Douglas’ 20th birthday.
The news was delivered following a 12-minute interview with police after the shooting, with Huntersville Police Department Detective Tim Lesser questioning Douglas in his hospital bed, while he was waiting to receive stitches.
(Lesser referred Rolling Stone’s request for comment to the department’s public-information officer, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment beyond providing a police incident report.)
“Do you know anything on Jaylin’s status?” Lesser asked him to conclude the interview.
“Nah, I ain’t talked to him. Is he all right?,” Douglas replied. “Why don’t you tell me if he not?”
Life has not been the same for Douglas since. He says he’s crossed paths with Kirk twice since the fatal altercation; once at a downtown Charlotte sports bar, another time more recently, at a Charlotte Hornets basketball game.
Each time Douglas was far enough away from Kirk, but he still felt the need to remove himself from the venue, unable to bear being in Kirk’s presence even from a distance. “I guess you could kind of say it’s like a PTSD type of thing,” Douglas tells Rolling Stone.
The childhood friends were fresh off a shift at Wikoff Color Corp. in nearby Fort Mill, South Carolina.
It was November, and with colder weather moving in, they made a stop at Walmart to find thermals to wear under their work gear.
Walmart surveillance footage reviewed by Rolling Stone shows the pair entering the store around 6:30 p.m., laughing, both dressed in hoodies, tracksuit bottoms, and rubber slides.
While walking around, Douglas recalls, Craig spotted someone he thought looked familiar, a local rapper who went by the name of DaBaby.
At first, Douglas tells Rolling Stone, he doubted it was Kirk, simply because he wasn’t dressed in a way befitting a hot, rising rapper.
And beyond that, this man was shopping for baby clothes in a Walmart.
Douglas admits that as they kept walking he took some extra glances toward Kirk to figure out if it was really him.
That’s when Kirk noticed them. “That’s what eventually started it; when he took it the wrong way,” Douglas says.
“We were trying to see who you are, and he took it as somebody is looking at him with a problem.”
Footage reviewed by Rolling Stone shows Craig standing nearby when Kirk rammed into Douglas, his left hand hanging by his side and his right scratching his face. At one point, after Kirk and Douglas start fighting, “Craig reaches into the front of his waistband to pull out what appears to be a firearm,” according to Bunting’s report. Craig moves toward the interlocked men and “puts his left hand between the fighting pair, as if to pull them off one another,” according to the report. Osborne then interjects herself into the scuffle, attempting to separate Kirk from Douglas before moving closer to Craig, pushing him and hitting him in the face, according to the surveillance footage and report.
The footage of DaBaby killing someone at Walmart has been released. pic.twitter.com/iwlOlPx83V
— hy (@TheMindOfHY) April 25, 2022
At that moment, Kirk is able to break free one of his hands, pulling out a concealed .40-caliber Glock from his waistband and shooting Craig one time in the side at close range. Craig stumbles before running into a nearby aisle, his body doubled over as splatters of blood leave a trail behind him. A third camera angle shows Craig collapsing to the ground at the other end of the aisle.
While Douglas claims that he never saw Craig draw a weapon, Osborne and Kirk told police they saw Craig pull a gun out while the rapper was entangled with Douglas, and Kirk told police he heard Osborne yelling “He got a gun, he got a gun.” One witness — a Walmart customer — told police he saw Craig with a weapon in his waistband area, and another — a Walmart employee — said he also saw Craig with a gun, according to the death-investigation report, which ultimately concluded that prosecutors couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Kirk didn’t act in self-defense.
“He’s like trying to get around his homeboy and shoot me,” Kirk says, excitedly telling police that he discharged his firearm multiple times. “When I break loose and get free with [my] gun … his homeboy is right here, and I shoot, boom, boom, boom.”
So did Walmart have this Dababy footage the whole time? pic.twitter.com/npBAsfjkCt
— partna ˣ (@onIychloexhalle) April 25, 2022
and
So many talented ppl not getting a chance & DaBaby out here in the wrong career . He need to work at Waffle House
— Mango Mami (@Biinx_Frappe) April 24, 2022
and
The niggas preying on me can’t fuck wit the people praying for me! ???
— DaBaby (@DaBabyDaBaby) April 25, 2022
P.S: We watched this video yesterday done by Lovelyti TV, when you have some time, watch the entire thing, and comment below.
