Mac Dre’s final album, released only 13 days before his murder, was meant to be the spiritual successor of The Mac’s first EP from 1988, The Game is Thick. Mac Dre’s name pays homage to another one of Vallejo’s musical legends, Michael “The Mac” Robinson, who was only able to release two EP’s under Strictly Business Records, before being shot to death in 1991. Motherfucker’s would try to beat him up because they were jealous of him. His mom didn’t want him out there, but he didn’t want to go home,” Sleep Dank says. “When he came to The Crest for the first time, he just got addicted. He remembers first meeting Mac Dre in 1986. Sleep Dank, a Vallejo rapper and friend of Mac Dre’s, was born and raised in the Country Club Crest. When he was three, he moved 30 minutes north to Vallejo, a city of just over 120,000, famous for having the first United States Navy base on the Pacific Coast.įrom an early age, Mac Dre gravitated towards a section of Vallejo called the Country Club Crest, an out-of-the-way neighborhood long known to outsiders as a hotbed of drug crime and violence. There is a mural of Mac Dre in the Ivy Hill section of Oakland, California, the place where he was born on July 5, 1970. “It’s not a mystery if you look at the case file.”
“I mean, you have the case files,” he says. When asked if it was frustrating being unable to shut a case after all the work he’d done over more than a decade, Detective Babcock said this: “I lived that case for I don’t know how many years.”
“I remember everything about that case,” Detective Babcock says. He said they feared that the interview would only cause more problems for the people involved. However, in a brief phone interview from January 25, 2021, Detective Babcock said that the media department within the KCPD wouldn’t approve detectives to speak publicly about the case. The KCPD has declined to comment on the documents. Detectives spoke with dozens of witnesses and suspects over the years they spent an untold amount of money and manpower to solve this case and yet they’ve never even released a suspect name. The complete story of how, why and who killed one of the greatest rappers of all time is laid out in more than 1,200 never before seen documents requested from the KCPD. The KCPD have never arrested or charged anybody with the murder and the high profile nature of the killing has continued to generate rumors and theories among hip-hop fans and true crime aficionados.
The dead body belonged to Andre Hicks, known to the world as Mac Dre, one of the most influential hip-hop artists in history.ĭespite multiple investigations and a string of alleged retaliation murders that left three more people dead, very little is known about the actual circumstances surrounding the death of Mac Dre, Vallejo’s hometown hero, the larger than life orchestrator of the Thizzle Dance and a key player in the Hyphy movement that still influences hip-hop culture to this day. The white van allegedly belonged to Savino Davila, a 27-year-old man who prosecutors say was at the head of a drug trafficking organization that brought more than 330 pounds of cocaine into Kansas between 20. “The right side of the victim’s neck was up against a small tree.” “The victim’s left arm was slightly across his body and his right arm was out straight,” he wrote. This was several years before he would appear on America’s Most Wanted, American Gangster and a show on the Investigation Discovery channel about women who may have killed their husbands. “The victim was lying on his back, with his left leg out straight and his right leg bent at the knee,” Detective Babcock wrote in his crime scene report. The driver’s side of the van had been found with more than 30 bullet holes and a man was found shot to death nearby, having been thrown from the vehicle upon impact from the crash. It appeared as if the van had spun sideways, slid around and went off the road, crashing into a muddy ditch.
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The area was poorly lit thanks to a series of street lights along the west edge of the highway. A totaled, white Dodge Legacy van was found on an embankment below Highway 71. Kansas City Detective Everett Babcock arrived to the scene of a murder on the morning after Halloween in 2004. Show your support to our ongoing efforts to catalogue the best music writing on the internet by subscribing to the Passion of the Weiss Patreon.ĭonald Morrison read through thousands of pages of documents provided by the Kansas City Police Department to shed light on one of hip-hop’s biggest mysteries. Photos courtesy of Kansas City Police Department / Patrick Johnson