Naseem Stevens had a lot to look forward to before he was shot and killed at a Grand Crossing gas station Friday evening, a few hours after the funeral for Mi’KQuale Cooper, better known as the rapper BloodHound Q50.
According to a police report obtained by the Tribune, detectives are probing a possible link between the attack on Stevens, 26, and Cooper’s funeral. But Stevens’ mother, Karonna Williams, has seen social media speculation about Stevens’ associations with the BloodHounds street gang and said she refused to “sit here and reduce my child to that.”
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Williams, 45, said her son was “a ray of sunshine” — charismatic and loving and joyful.
“I know what he is,” she said.
Growing up, Stevens, her oldest child, had been part of the South Shore Drill Team and at one point performed in New York, Williams said. He’d come by the nickname Poohman in middle school and held onto it as a social media handle, she added. But his family called him Naseem.
Stevens had “done things the wrong way” for some time, she said. He was sentenced to two years in prison in 2022 after pleading guilty in a pair of gun cases, court records show, and had been arrested again in the years following his release.
But his mother said he was “starting to understand what he wanted in his life” — particularly because he was expecting the birth of his first child next year.
“I think he started to realize that that wasn’t the road he needed to go down, especially now that he was going to be a dad,” Williams said.
He was “extremely excited” for his child’s arrival, she said, and to start life with his partner.
Williams last saw Stevens early Friday morning, as she was leaving for work. She didn’t know what his plans were that day, she said, and wasn’t sure if he’d been invited to or attended Cooper’s funeral.
According to a police report, the car Stevens was driving at the time of the shooting had a funeral sticker on it. Police noted that Cooper’s funeral had taken place in Merrillville, Indiana, earlier on Friday. The report also nodded to Cooper’s ties to the area where Stevens was killed, but cops weren’t certain about the link between the two attacks.
Cooper was killed in Fuller Park gas station less than two weeks earlier. He had pulled up to a gas station near 42nd and Wentworth in a white Tesla around 4 a.m. on Sept. 14 when six shooters drove up in two separate cars and fired at Cooper and a woman who was with him in the Tesla. The woman was not hurt, but Cooper was pronounced dead within an hour of the shooting.
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His death prompted intense speculation on social media and tributes from his artistic collaborators, who praised his attention to detail, his sense for music production and the way he was “unapologetically himself and never afraid to tell his story.”
No one was in custody for either shooting as of Monday afternoon, police said, and homicide detectives were still investigating.