Rapper Mo3 Feared Dead After Drive-By Shooting In Dallas: Report
Not everything is "for the 'gram."
Getty Images A sad day for hip hop fans everywhere.
Dallas rapper Mo3 is feared to be dead after a drive-by shooting allegedly took place on a busy Texas freeway on Nov. 11.
While authorities have yet to confirm that the identity of the victim is in fact, Mo3, sources close to the rapper, whose real name is Melvin Noble, confirmed that he is the deceased victim in the incident.
Who is Mo3?
His name has come up a lot in different hip hop-related conversations because of another incident that eerily echoed what authorities fear actually happened to the Dallas rapper.
Mo3 is a rapper that's had a bit of a fan following building up for himself for quite some time.
His biggest success came in 2015, when he released his album Rain, in what some critics called a retrospective of "brutally honest" hip hop.
Just 23 years old at the time, Mo3 said that he was proud of being "honest" with his music.
"I tell the truth in my music. I’m not talking about standing in the trap and whippin’ foreign cars or having designer this, designer that. No, I’m talking about how my mom couldn’t pay her bills and when we didn’t have anywhere to sleep and stayed eating noodles every day," he said at the time of Rain's release.
He's had beef with other rappers in Houston, and made headlines for a "shooting" that turned out to be a publicity stunt.
As we've learned from the Biggie and Tupac drama, it's very easy for "rap beefs" to move from the studio to the streets and escalate into violence.
So when Mo3 revealed that he'd been involved with beefs with fellow rappers Yella Beezy and Trapboy Freddy, some hip hop fans felt that Mo3's alleged "shooting" in 2019 — which was actually just a publicity stunt for his song, "Why?" — was an inevitable conclusion.
Additionally, Mo3 said that because Yella Beezy had been shot, previously, in his city, he "moved around differently," so there were some hip hop fans that wondered if his alleged shooting was connected to Yella Beezy's.
Even though he's not a "mainstream" rapper, he has achieved a fair measure of success.
Success isn't just found in popularity, and Mo3 is proof of that.
Back in September 2019, he revealed that even though he's not a mainstream rapper, he was successful enough to buy his mother a house. (And his mother seemed happy about it, too.)
Mo3 was homeless for a while.
Back in April 2019, an old photo of Mo3 with his t-shirt around his legs and sleeping on a bus started making the rounds on the Internet. Mo3, however, was unfazed by these photos.
He spoke extensively on being homeless in the past, and wanted people to use those photos of him sleeping on a bus as "motivation" to do better in life. It was also later revealed that Yella Beezy, his longtime arch-rival, released the photos.
He was charged with four counts of robbery.
When Mo3 was 17 years old, he found himself in a world of trouble when he was charged with four counts of robbery.
He said he messed up his life and his mother's life with those charges, because his mother lost the family home and car trying to pay for his lawyers' fees.
He also said he didn't realize how much his actions were causing harm until he saw his mother suffering from them.
Ultimately, though he was facing up to 45 years for his role in the robberies, he only served 10 years.
Mo3 claims he was shot in the head on December 10, 2019.
On December 10, 2019, Mo3 took to Instagram Live to share that he'd been shot in the head. In the clip, Mo3 is seen wearing a white shirt coated in blood.
When someone in the video's background told Mo3 to get off Instagram and get to the hospital, he said that even though he'd been shot in the head and back, he was "good" and didn't need medical treatment.
It all turned out to be a publicity stunt.
One needn't be a medical doctor to know that it's highly unlikely that someone can get shot in the head and the back and simply be "good."
Mo3's flippant response to his alleged shooting caused some speculation that it was all, in fact, a publicity stunt to promote Mo3's new project, a mixtape called Osama.
And, as it turns out, it was later confirmed that it was all a publicity stunt, indeed.
Nearly a year later, Mo3 is feared to be dead from gun violence.
In a tragic twist of fate, Mo3 was reportedly "sprayed with bullets" as he drove on a busy Dallas highway on Nov. 11.
A car allegedly pulled up to Mo3's car while he was driving and fired multiple rounds into his vehicle. Mo3 reportedly lost control of his car, crashing into a concrete barrier before his vehicle came to a halt.
Bernadette Giacomazzo is an editor, writer, publicist, and photographer whose work has appeared in Teen Vogue, People, Us Weekly, The Source, XXL, HipHopDX, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, BET.com, and more.