Three men were shot Tuesday in Atlanta near the set of a music video that was allegedly being filmed by rapper Lil Baby.
According to the Atlanta Police Department, officers responded at 4:50 p.m. to a call that several people were near a commercial strip on Verbena Street in northwest Atlanta. A 24-year-old man suffered an apparent gunshot wound to the arm and a 27-year-old man suffered an apparent gunshot wound to the back, police said. Both were alert, conscious and breathing and were transported to a hospital for treatment, officers said.
A third man, 23, was apparently shot in the neck and was transported to the hospital, police said. He was also alert, conscious and breathing and was treated by medical personnel.
“Preliminary investigation indicates that the incident occurred during the filming of a video. Aggravated Assault Unit investigators responded to the scene to determine the circumstances surrounding the incident. “At this time, the investigation is ongoing,” the department said in a statement, noting that the investigation was in its early stages and that information could change as it progresses.
Atlanta Police Maj. Ralph Woolfolk told reporters at the scene that the people who were shot were not part of the video production crew, but that “there may have been individuals involved in the entire production who were involved.” involved in the incident,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Woolfolk told reporters that the shooting appeared to be “an isolated and targeted incident.”
A department spokesperson could not confirm who was filming the music video when contacted by The Times on Wednesday.
Representatives for the “Drip Too Hard” and “Yes Indeed” rapper, whose real name is Dominique Armani Jones, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. However, Shade Room confirmed that the Atlanta-born rapper was safe after the incident and a spokesperson for Lil Baby said that neither he nor his production team were involved in the shooting.
A video posted on Instagram by a local taqueria, Slapping Tacos ATL, appeared to show the artist and his entourage arriving at the shopping strip where the shooting had occurred hours earlier.
“I was on my way to deliver a burrito and they just came, boom boom boom. I thought, 'Are you serious?' It was crazy,” Chasity Roman of Slapping Tacos ATL told Fox 5 Atlanta. “I fell between the bullets. They were just bullets, pow, pow, pow. It was terrible.”
The shots were fired in the parking lot of the Village shopping center, a plaza just north of I-20 across from an apartment complex in the Dixie Hills neighborhood, the Journal-Constitution reported. TMZ also obtained footage of the incident, which appeared to show a group of men apparently pretending to film their own video or content nearby when gunfire erupted.
