Three men were shot Tuesday in Atlanta near the set of a music video purportedly being filmed by rapper Lil Baby.
According to the Atlanta Police Department, officers responded at 4:50 p.m. to a call saying that several people were near a commercial strip of Verbena Street in northwestern Atlanta. A 24-year-old man sustained an apparent gunshot wound to the arm and a 27-year-old man an apparent gunshot wound to the 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 transported himself to the hospital, police said. He also was alert, conscious and breathing and was attended to by medical personnel.
“Preliminary investigation indicates that the incident occurred during a video shoot. Investigators with the Aggravated Assault Unit 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 the information could change as it progressed.
Atlanta Police Maj. Ralph Woolfolk told reporters at the scene that the people who were shot were not part of the video production team but that “there may have been individuals involved in the totality of the production that were 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 spokesperson for the department could not confirm the artist filming the music video when reached Wednesday by The Times.
Representatives for the “Drip Too Hard” and “Yes Indeed” rapper, real name Dominique Armani Jones, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. However, the 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 taco shop, Slapping Tacos ATL, appeared to show the artist and his entourage pulling up to the commercial strip where the shooting had occurred hours before.
“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 in between the bullets. It was nothing but bullets, pow, pow, pow. It was terrible.”
The shots were fired in the parking lot of the Village retail center, a plaza just north of I-20 across the street from an apartment complex in the Dixie Hills neighborhood, the Journal-Constitution reported. TMZ also obtained footage from the incident, which appeared to show a group of men apparently pretending to film their own video or content nearby when shots broke out.
