Atlanta Police said the Tuesday morning double shooting at PatchWerk Studios on Hemphill Avenue in northwest Atlanta was an attempted armed robbery. The owner of the music studio says the incident was fueled by boasting on social media and jealousy.
While talking with 11Alive's Neima Abdulahi on Tuesday, PatchWerk owner Curtis Daniel III said that the studio has been in operation for 23 years without any sort of crime taking place there, a far cry from what has happened at other studios in other parts of the city.
Daniel says that all of the sessions at PatchWerk are private. There are no signs on the building and it's suggested that artists not post on social media about their sessions until after the fact.
"We try to encourage people to post about it the next day. There's so many people following you that you don't know what's going on," Daniel said. "You never know what you attract. It's kind of like posting pictures of the vacation after you get back."
A sampling of the danger and violence surrounding music studios and the music industry in metro Atlanta in just the last two years includes:
- August 2017, one man was killed outside a southwest Atlanta music studio on Metropolitan Parkway at Bronner Brothers Way in Southwest Atlanta.
- May 2017, one man was killed at The Castle Soul Asylum Studios in the 1600 block of Defoor Circle in northwest Atlanta.
- April 2017, two other men were killed outside a music studio on Metropolitan Parkway and Bronner Brothers Way in southwest Atlanta.
- December 2016, rapper Bankroll Fresh was gunned down outside the Street Execs Studio in the 1700 block of Defoor Place in northwest Atlanta.
- November 2015, 11Alive News reported that neighbors in the Underwood Hills neighborhood had complained of shootings, assaults, car break-ins and other repeated crime that they blamed on the Street Execs Studio on Defoor Place.
In their digital series of stories, #ThirdCoastATL, 11Alive's Neima Abdulahi and Adrianne Haney examined the danger and the violence that surround the music scene in Atlanta.
After the death of Bankroll Fresh, artists who knew the rapper took to social media to discuss how it affected them -- including Gucci Mane.
“It was painful because I knew Bankroll Fresh,” Gucci said. “I watched him since he was, like, 17 years old. I was already hip to him and working with him. I was proud of him, and I never got a chance to see him at the level he was at because I was locked up.”
But for local rapper, Quiktrip, Bankroll Fresh’s childhood friend and label-mate of Street Money Worldwide, the danger that claimed the life of Fresh is part of trying to make it in the game.
“This what comes with it,” he said. “It’s crazy that we done been through so much in life that we never thought music could bring this much harm towards us.”
The rapper reflected on losing someone who was like a brother to him. But, unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time gun violence would hit so close to home.
“The people we sat on the wall with and cried with, about the stories of how we make and how we gon’ live it up, they’re not here no more,” Quiktrip said. “Walo. Money. And Fresh.”
Money, is Lil Money. Shot dead in a drive-by shooting in November 2016. Like Bankroll Fresh, he was also a member of Street Money Worldwide and died while protecting a 6-year-old prodigy, Bankroll PJ, Fresh’s nephew.
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