Breaking the news to all of Jorell’s associates that I believed Chauncey James killed him took months.
One of Jorell’s incarcerated friends hadn’t originally believed James killed Jorell, but he found my argument persuasive.
And yet our conversation, which took place over the phone from prison, made me uncomfortable.
“Would you like to see him locked up?” I asked him.
“Me? Nah,” he responded. “I want him dead.”
He said this casually, in a way that shocked me, especially considering we were speaking on a recorded line.
“You might say it’s ignorant, but that’s the culture of the streets,” he said. “I understand what you saying too, ‘Let him rot in jail,’ but still…I feel like he should die.”
These words made me shudder. They felt at odds with my moral beliefs—that violence was wrong—and to my (perhaps naive) faith in the American justice system.
And yet, he wasn’t the first person who told me this. Other young men close to Jorell concurred that, when a murder was committed, a prison sentence was not an appropriate consequence. Incarceration, they said, was a relatively easy life, one without bills, where all of your meals were accounted for.
Prisoners eventually come home. Murder victims never do. Only an eye for an eye could properly settle the score.
I tried to argue. I fully believed James should not be subjected to vigilante justice. Perpetuating the cycle of violence could ultimately blow back on him and the people he loved, I told Jorell’s incarcerated friend.
“I know,” he said. “But honestly, it’s the code of the streets.”
Then, unprompted, he began describing the time immediately following Jorell’s death, when tempers were running high. “I did what I was supposed to do,” he said. “I’m the one getting guns and trying to go to war with them.”
I was aghast. No one had told me about this before. The “them” in his sentence were the various suspects in Jorell’s case. Since at the time no one knew who killed Jorell, this friend had multiple targets in his sights.
I held my breath as he described assembling a party to follow him into battle. Members of Jorell’s family declined to join him, but some of Jorell’s other friends agreed to help seek retribution.
Under the cover of darkness, the hastily assembled crew hit the streets. I’m not sure where all they went, but eventually they got to Chauncey James’s house.
Most members of the party didn’t count James as their top suspect. But one did. And that was all it took.
The James house was dark. A member of the crew went to the front door and rang the doorbell. Though inhabitants could be heard inside, no one came to the door. The group drove around the block a couple of times, and then saw lights had been turned on.
And then, they unloaded.
“We shot up their house, all in the front, the windows,” Jorell’s friend told me. “We shot that house up.”
Soon, he was told, police and an ambulance showed up. By then, his crew was long gone.
I could not verify this account. Ferguson police had no record of the incident. No one seems to have been caught. It’s unclear if anyone was injured.
But according to Jorell’s friend, their rampage continued. After stopping in Kinloch to buy and snort some heroin, “we shot up these other peoples’ house too,” he told me. This house, he said, was home to the wheelchair-bound man who lived in Berkeley, near Jorell’s girlfriend Danielle, and was supposedly related to Chauncey James. This home was where, according to a rumor, someone speculated that “something was about to happen” to Jorell, shortly before his death.
Again, I could find no record of this, and I didn’t press Jorell’s friend for more details because he was speaking over a recorded line. The guy in the wheelchair was not killed in this incident, but he died at some point not long afterward. I would assume his death and Jorell’s deaths were unrelated, but really I have no idea.
By now I was beginning to question everything. Why was I just now learning of these retaliatory shootings related to Jorell’s death, years after the fact? What else didn’t I know?
My unease deepened as I continued investigating Chauncey James. There was so much about him I didn’t understand. He didn’t post frequently about his personal life online. The best way I could get to know him was through his rap videos. This felt like an odd way to understand someone, considering he cloaked himself in the persona of a performer. Yet, it was somehow appropriate. It was as if my career as a hip-hop journalist had prepared me for this moment.
And so I listened to his songs. All of them. This was probably an unhealthy thing to do, considering his talk of gunplay and murdering his adversaries hit so close to home. Despite the tough guy bravado, every once in a while James offered deeper insight, rapping with heartfelt sentiment about his past. He said he’d been raised by a felon, and that he talked to his gun “more than the reverend.”
My grandma saying that I need prayer
But I ain’t hearin’
I’d watched a dozen or so of his videos when one of them caught me off guard. Filmed at his house on a low budget in 2018, it seemed fairly boilerplate on first glance. But as I looked closer I saw a small, intimate detail: stuck to the fridge with a magnet was a note handwritten in purple marker reading: “DADDY I LOVE YOU TO THE MOON AND BACK,” signed by his young daughter.
This display of adoration gave me shivers. As a parent, I identified with this father-child bond, and became concerned for James’s safety. James was only a bit younger than I was, and I tried to put myself in his shoes, tried to understand how he might have felt when Jorell began antagonizing him and his family, back in 2016.
I became even more concerned after watching a new video James posted to Facebook, in April 2021. Entitled “First steps since 10 days ago,” and filmed at The Rehabilitation Institute of St. Louis, it showed him relearning to walk with the assistance of a physical therapist while wearing a hard-plastic cervical collar. His left arm was in a sling. He’d clearly been in some kind of horrible accident. I wondered if his injury was related to the death of a close friend and musical collaborator, who, as I learned from his social media feeds, had been killed around the same time.
This information humanized James to me. He had a family who loved him, and was just as vulnerable as anyone else. He’d come up in the same trying circumstances as Jorell, and could potentially have the same fate. Even if he had killed Jorell, that didn’t mean his family wouldn’t be heartbroken if something happened to him.
I wondered: Had he been shot again? Maybe he had an enemy I’d never heard of, or maybe it was someone close to Jorell, who did so as retaliation. None of Jorell’s associates would admit to it, but why would they?
The whole business made me anxious. And Chauncey James wasn’t the only suspect in Jorell’s case who remained in the line of fire.