The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports this morning that the police has arrested four men suspected of the murder. The AJC writes, “Bahir Howard, 22, Corderra Walker, 21, Terry James Fuller, 31, and Terrance Jones, 23 — are being held without bond in the Spalding County Jail on charges of murder, aggravated battery, child cruelty and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime.”

A little girl playing nearby with her toy car was shot in the foot and injured during the shooting, which took place around 6pm Saturday night. According to reports, 150 people were present during the shooting either working on the video shoot or there to see it take place. Several witnesses got a good look at the assassins. “I saw them,” witness Virginia Berry told Channel 2’s Tony Thomas. “They just shot him like this; pump, pump, shoot, pump, shoot, pump.” At least twenty rounds were fired, according to the police.

Eerily, the cover of Yung Hott’s single looked like the crime scene, complete with a Griffin police cruiser, cordons, and a body. At this point the motive for the killing is not known.

Yung Hott has a previous record of drug-related offenses, but was in the process of refashioning his life as a full-time rapper. His single was receiving some airplay in the Atlanta rap scene at the time of his murder.

You can watch Channel 2’s coverage of the incident here.

Check back for more about this later.

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November 13, 1972, in Pennsylvania
Died: August 28, 2000, in Indiana
Band: Ink & Dagger, Crud is the Cult

Philadelphia’s Ink & Dagger was an unusual hardcore band. Over the course of its career, the band played a hypnotic fusion of aggro punk riffs and noisy techno. Ink & Dagger dented the indie circuit with this sonic stew coupled with, at least in the beginning, a dramatic vampire theme that Vampire Weekend picked up on brought fame a few years later.

“It was very discouraging to have people only see us as ‘that emo-goth-core band that wears makeup’ when there was much, much more to the puzzle,” singer Sean Patrick McCabe said in an interview with Ink19, a fanzine. “I can understand that some people never really took this band seriously,” he added.

The group might seem odd to the uninitiated, but behind the noise and makeup it was a reflective punk unit fuelled by McCabe’s fiery but intelligent lyrics and a propensity to shock. “Think of a vampire as a metaphor for the world,” says Robby Redcheeks, Ink & Dagger’s former roommate and road manager. “Blood is a person’s energy and vampires feed off of it. It had nothing to do with vampires per se, but was more a metaphor for punk rock and the society.”

“Sean McCabe was an unexplainable force,” Robby says, “ One of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known and also one of the craziest.”

Ink & Dagger were extremely influential in the Philly hardcore scene, but it was only later that they reached a wider audience—a few years after they disbanded when the creators of Amped, a the snowboarding video game for Microsoft Xbox, snatched three songs from The Fine Art Of Original Sin without permission. The theft was settled out of court in 2006.

In 2000, shortly after finishing Ink & Dagger’s third and final album and on his way to a new job, McCabe asphyxiated in an Indiana motel room. He was 27 years old.

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Born: November 26, 1973, in Madrid, Spain
Died: November 24, 2001, in Bassersdorf, Switzerland
Band: Passion Fruit

If you’ve lived in or visited Europe in the last fifteen years, you’ve heard the cheesy bubblegum sound of Eurodance. The beats, lyrics, and choruses are designed like a clever virus to rule dance floors and airwaves from Ibiza to Tromsø for a month or so—just long enough to record and release something new. Passion Fruit was one of these pop groups, and in ’99 it released “The Rigga-Ding-Dong-Song,” which charted Top 10 in fourteen countries. Internal tension split the group, but management decided to continue with a fresh crop.

Over the course of 2000 and 2001, Passion Fruit released a trio of high charting singles (all big in Germany of course) and the album Spanglish Love Affairs, but the Eurodance fairytale ended grimly on November 24, 2001.

After a performance in Berlin they boarded Crossair flight 3597 to Zurich. On its way to landing, the pilot descended below the minimum descent altitude and crashed into a hill, killing twenty-four of the thirty-three on board. Passion Fruit members Nathalie van het Ende and 27-year-old Maria Serrano-Serrano were among the victims, while Debby St. Marteen survived.

Proceeds from Passion Fruit’s posthumous single, “I’m Dreaming of…A Winter Wonderland” went to families of the crash victims.

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Born: March 18, 1978
Died: April 19, 2005
Band: American Head Charge

American Head Charge’s self-released debut album caught the attention of Rick Rubin, who signed and produced The War of Art in 2001. By then the group was a supporting act on Ozzfest and the Pledge of Allegiance tour with Slipknot and others. In April of the following year guitarist Dave Rogers quit and Bryan Ottoson was invited to join. Less than 24 hours later Ottoson landed in Los Angeles to play guitar on the “Just So You Know” music video.

Over the next couple of years, three of the band members drifted out to the deep end with drug use, but after rehab stints and a few new faces on board the band recorded The Feeding, which Bryan co-wrote ten out of twelve tracks for. The album was released in early ’05, but disaster struck a few months later when Bryan was found cold on the bus. The night before, he downed a few drinks after a gig, popped penicillin and a pain med he was prescribed for strep throat, and went to bed in a bunk on the bus. They found the 27 year-old dead April 19, 2005. His death was ruled an accidental prescription drug overdose.

Bryan Ottoson’s “333” tattoo on the back of his neck represented the synchronicity of his life’s events that seemingly happened in threes. He said he looked at the time every day at 3:33 p.m. and 3:33 a.m. inexplicably and without fail. Bryan died almost three years to the date after he joined the band. But the significance of threes didn’t end with Ottoson’s death. Brian Ottoson was 27 when he died (a factor of three) and the band canceled three shows following his death.

Despite powerful live shows, AHC never made as good a name for themselves as some of their nü metal peers. Nevertheless, tracks from The Feeding (2005) have popped up here and there in popular entertainment. “Leave Me Alone” was featured on an episode of HBO’s Entourage, while “Loyalty” was included in the multi-platform videogame NHL 06.

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Born: February 1, 1979, in Etchojoa, Sonora, Mexico
Died: November 26, 2006, in Reynosa, Mexico

The popular Mexican banda music singer Valentin Elizalde is another recent 27. Elizalde was ambushed and murdered along with his manager and driver after performing at a fair in Reynosa, Mexico, November 25, 2006 (Reynosa is across the border from McAllen, Texas). A van followed his Chevy Suburban, and once it was within range its passengers pumped more than seventy bullets from semi-automatic weapons, nailing Elizalde with eight slugs. The hit was most likely related to an ongoing drug feud between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels over smuggling routes to the US.

Shortly before his death, somebody posted a provocative montage on YouTube that featured photos of assassinated Gulf cartel members set to Elizalde’s hit song “A Mis Enemigos,” which translates to “To My Enemies.” Elizalde was born in the Sinaloa region and once wrote a tribute song to its leader in the style of narcocorridos, songs about the deeds of narco traffickers that resemble old folk songs about real-life rum smugglers and gangsters.

It’s speculated that the killing was orchestrated by Los Zetas, a rogue group of Mexican commandos hired by the Gulf Cartel (The US Army’s School of the Americas in Georgia once trained many of Los Zeta’s officers—dangerous and well-equipped people who are now responsible for hits on US soil, kidnapping DEA agents, and shoot-outs with the US Border Patrol.) According to the BBC, more than 2,000 people died from Mexican drug cartel violence in 2006.

Valentin Elizalde was known as “El Gallo de Oro,” the golden rooster, and released ten albums between 1998 and 2006. He was found in the backseat of the car clutching his trademark rooster pendant that he always wore on a necklace.

In 2007, Elizalde was posthumously nominated for a Grammy for Best Banda Album.

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Born: May 5, 1976, in El Paso, Texas
Died: May 25, 2003, in Los Angeles, California
Bands: De Facto, The Mars Volta

Ward piped De Facto’s dub and The Mars Volta’s sonic output through an assortment of guitar effects, sculpting the sound of these two highly original bands in real-time.

He died of a heroin overdose aged 27 less than a month before The Mars Volta’s debut De-loused in the Comatorium was released, but his influence on the band and its members linger. While working as a repo-man, Jeremy found a journal that became the main inspiration for Frances the Mute, and he also coined the term “amputechture,” the title for the band’s third LP. After his fatal overdose, band mates Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez swore off hard drugs for good.

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