Sinthoro Upper was finally getting his moment when his 16-year-old stepson ended everything over a disagreement about smoking weed in their Brooklyn apartment.
The teen was arrested Tuesday afternoon in the Bronx, nine days after he allegedly shot the rapper twice inside their NYCHA home at Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene on April 12.
The deadly dispute started that morning when Sinthoro Upper’s girlfriend, who was three months pregnant with his child, asked her son to stop smoking in the house because she didn’t want the baby exposed to the smoke.
According to NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny, the teen denied he was smoking and got disrespectful to his mother, which prompted Sinthoro Upper to step in and tell him to watch his tone. What happened next was a physical fight between the two men.
“He walks back to the bedroom, grabs a shoebox, pulls a gun and shoots him two times, once in the chest, once in the arm,” Kenny told reporters during a briefing at Police Headquarters.
The rapper was rushed to New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Detectives tracked the teen to East 165th Street in the Bronx, where he was taken into custody without incident. He had a backpack with all his belongings and looked like he’d been living on the street since the shooting.
Police sources said the teen had two prior arrests, and there were two previous incidents when cops were called to the family home to stop arguments between the boy and his mother.
According to Yahoo News, the rapper had been struggling in the music industry for years before his song “Slidin” suddenly went viral after 50 Cent soundtracked an Instagram reel with it on March 16.
Sinthoro Upper leaves behind a 16-year-old daughter, a 14-year-old son, and a baby on the way with his girlfriend.