Julio Foolio is shot and killed in Tampa

Why it matters

Charles Jones, who recorded as Julio Foolio, was shot and killed outside a Holiday Inn Express in Tampa on June 23, 2024, his 26th birthday. He had been in Tampa to celebrate. The shooting was the latest in a long-running cycle of retaliatory violence between rival Jacksonville rap-and-street sets (Foolio's Voodoo Boyz on one side, the ATK/Cuttin' Throats on the other), a cycle that had been documented in real time across his YouTube discography and the true-crime YouTube channels that had been covering Jacksonville rap for years. The broader Jacksonville rap scene that Foolio was central to had, in the decade before his death, become one of the most-studied case studies of social-media-amplified rap-and-street violence in the country. Songs were diss tracks. Diss tracks named specific dead rivals. The cycle escalated. Foolio's catalog (which is enormous: dozens of releases across several aliases) is structurally inseparable from the violence-and-naming cycle. He was 26. The cycle did not end with his death. The cycle has, if anything, accelerated in the year since. You can argue the rap-industry promotional system that turns Jacksonville-style street violence into commercial content has a moral responsibility to engage with the cycle differently. The argument has been made many times. The system has not, so far, responded.