A burgeoning Brooklyn rapper cops believe was shot to death by his 16-year-old stepson in a clash over smoking in their NYCHA apartment was expecting a child with the suspect’s mother — and didn’t want the unborn baby exposed to second-hand smoke, relatives said Tuesday.
Jamel Davis’ longtime live-in girlfriend first asked her son to stop smoking in the family’s home in the Walt Whitman Houses near Fort Greene Park, sparking a fight, according to the slain man’s heartbroken brother. The teen denied he had been smoking.
“(The victim’s stepson) was being so disrespectful, calling her some names,” said Davis’ brother, Geo Miller, who spoke to Davis’ girlfriend after the shooting. “That’s what got my brother out the bed, to say, ‘Hey bro, why are you talking to your mother like that? If you wasn’t smoking that’s fine but you don’t need to talk to her like that.’”
“Then one thing led to another,” added Miller. “It didn’t warrant (his death) … You don’t do that to a person that treated you with love and respect.”
The teen’s mother is three months pregnant with Davis’ child, according to the victim’s brother. The teen being sought by cops is her only other child.
Davis had everything to live for at the time of his shock slaying. The baby on the way would have been his third child. And after years of struggling to make headway in the rap scene, his new song “Slidin” was starting to go viral and even soundtracked a recent Instagram reel from 50 Cent.
“He just never gave up. And when he turned 43 years old, he finally gets this opportunity,” Miller, 40, said of his brother’s recent success. “And then he gets killed by his stepson. How do you make it this far to get killed by someone you raised?”
Davis was shot in the upper body inside the apartment on Cumberland Walk near Carlton Ave. about 10:50 a.m. Sunday, police said.
Medics rushed Davis to New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, where he died.
The shooter ran off after the shooting and has not been caught, police say. Cops are looking to question the victim’s stepson as a person of interest, NYPD sources say.
The victim was a well-loved mentor to local teens, helping to organize local basketball tournaments and urging them to not just rap but learn music production as well.
“My brother wasn’t a violent person,” Miller said. “He gave back to the community along with his friends and he was just a great spirit. He was a family guy and that’s what kills me about this entire situation.”
Miller and his brother grew up in the Ingersoll Houses “with no mother and father,” he said.
“But at the end of the day, we were loving people,” Miller said. “My brother was a loving guy since he was a child.”
Davis performed under the name Sinthoro Upper. He and the teen suspect’s mother had been together for about eight years.
After years of trying to make it big, his song “Slidin” suddenly gained some traction with listeners — something that surprised Davis more than anyone else.
“The funny thing is that he was just playing on the song,” his brother recalled. “He saw a movie and it was like some type of mob movie and he was reenacting certain things … He was having a good time in the studio, joking around. So that wasn’t a real record — it just happened.”
50 Cent soundtracked a March 16 Instagram reel with “Slidin,” which helped draw in scores of listeners. In a podcast interview posted just three weeks ago, Davis was thrilled by his newfound success. “I look on the phone and say, ‘What, 50?’” he told the hosts of “Talk Ya Talk.” “I said, ‘What?!?’”
It was a welcome reward for a man who spent years trying to make it in the music business, his brother said.
“He had a dream he wanted to be an artist. When I say artist, it’s not just a rapper, he was a composer, he wrote songs, he wrote songs for other people,” Miller said. “His dedication, drive and his voice and his flow, it basically took over everything. That was his gift. His gift was, ‘I can do music.’ He is musically inclined and he had that in his spirit since 10 years old. He implemented that old soul into his records.”
Davis leaves behind a 16-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son in addition to the baby on the way, Miller said.
Until Sunday, Davis and his stepson appeared to get along, the victim’s sibling said.
“It never was a situation where my brother did any harm to him,” he said. “His mother would say that he treated her son like he was his.”
“I never heard him say more than three words at a time ever,” Miller said of the suspect. “I couldn’t even believe (he was responsible). I said, ‘It can’t be true!’”
But Miller did say the teen had recently started hanging out with the wrong crowd and became a teenage delinquent.
“He is heading for disaster,” Miller said of the victim’s stepson. “To take my brother’s life for nothing, (something) you could have walked away from? There was no violence, no physical altercation, it was just words. It was just words from a father to son.”
“For you to have that much hate in your heart after this man took care of you, that means you were on a demonic path,” he added. “They got to find him.”
With Rocco Parascandola
