Up-and-coming Brooklyn rapper Supa Gates has died nearly seven weeks after he was shot in the passenger seat of a Mercedes in Brooklyn.
Supa Gates, whose real name was Aaron Williams, was shot multiple times in the front passenger seat of the luxury vehicle parked on St. John’s Place near Troy Ave. in Crown Heights April 11. He died Thursday at Kings County Hospital, where he had been treated since the shooting.
The 25-year-old musician’s career had just started gaining momentum, with some of his tracks drawing tens of thousands of listeners on YouTube.com.
“He was gonna bust big,” said one close family member, noting that Williams was getting ready to sign with a major studio and go on his first tour starting the Fourth of July weekend.
“That was gonna be his debut,” the devastated relative said. “He was gonna destroy this place. He was working hard to make it.”
In the days before the shooting, he was pulling all-nighters at his music studio, his mother, Racquel Peters, 47, said.
“He had so much music. His first real onstage was July 5th, that’s when he was supposed to start,” Peters said.
Williams was conscious and alert for part of his hospital stay but his condition wavered until his death Thursday, relatives said
His track “Yellow Bentley,” was recently featured on Drake’s Ovo Sound Radio show.
Police have made no arrests and it’s not clear why he was shot.
“It wasn’t anything… it really and truly was jealously. It wasn’t a gang related issue, it wasn’t a drug-related issue,” his mother said. “Nobody knows how hard I worked to make sure my kids are OK. People don’t know the devastation they’re causing, and how many lives they’re destroying when they take somebody’s child.”
Williams grew up with his dad in Flatbush and went to Catholic school all his life — St. Gregory the Great Catholic Academy and St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Academy in Brooklyn for grade school, then Nazareth High School before taking classes at New York Institute of Technology for a year and a half.
“It’s hard going into his room, going into his space, knowing that he’s not there anymore,” his mother said. “I just wanted to say that people don’t realize how much they’re destroying an entire family when they do things like this.”
He started DJing at age 9 and making beats at age 15, carrying on the tradition of his uncle, who worked as a DJ, and his grandfather, who played the steel drums in Trinidad, his mother said.
Williams started taking his rap career seriously last year, after he became sick from COVID, his mother said.
In his younger days, he’d write music about anything but he made a name for himself as he started to write more about the streets.
When he wasn’t making music, Williams was a union iron worker and had most recently worked on 50 Hudson in Hudson Yards, relatives said. He had hoped to start a transportation business with his mother, but the pandemic put a stop to those plans.
Williams left a 1-year-old son behind as well as a younger brother, relatives said.
“She took it hard,” the family member said of the mother of Williams’ child. “She’s a mess right now.”
His mother added, “It’s just waking up every day, hoping that this is a dream. I listen for the door, I listen for when he says, ‘Mommy, I’m home, I’m OK.’ I don’t hear that anymore.”