West Coast rapper Jayceon Taylor, known more famously as The Game, has offered his assistance for a tragic, familiar cause in Baltimore.
On Sunday night, 18-year-old Sean Williams of Northwest Baltimore’s Forest Park neighborhood was shot multiple times on Edmondson Avenue. He was pronounced dead shortly after being taken to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center.
Court records show Williams had been jailed for months on a gun charge and was recently charged in a theft incident just before Christmas. He was released on bail last week.
As the Sun’s Justin Fenton and Kalani Gordon wrote yesterday, he was also a well-known dirt biker in Baltimore with tens of thousands of followers online. Last year, when The Game came to Baltimore to film a music video – one for a nearly eight-minute diss track directed at Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill – at the Gilmor Homes, Williams appeared front and center in several scenes (look for him here around the 4:50 mark).
Fenton today pointed out that the rapper received word of Williams’ passing and took to social media to express his condolences and make an appeal. He also announced he’s donated $1,000 of his own to Williams’ mother to pay her son’s early funeral.
“this is a kid I had the joy of crossing paths with so this one makes me really sad, so again, please let’s help his mother bury her ONLY,” he concluded in an Instagram post.
He added a link to Williams’ mother’s GoFundMe page in his biography. She needs to raise $8,000, she wrote, “for this sudden and unexpected expense of burying my son.”
Donations have been pouring in by the hour — $400 even just within the last 45 minutes, as of 2:15 p.m.
“he just turned 18 years old,” The Game said of Williams, “and was always smiling & the only thing he ever wanted to do is ride his dirt bike & one day become a professional so he could take care of his mother … well, his dreams have been cut short smh & his life was taken from him at too soon.”
His killing on Sunday night marked Baltimore’s 161st homicide of the year.
