Two killings related to Atlanta’s club scene shook the city’s hip-hop group a decade back. A single was solved. But the fatal taking pictures of one particular of Atlanta’s most influential DJs was not, and his death continues to haunt pals and infuriate family members.
William Fernando Barnes — who went by DJ Nando — was recognized for helping start the professions of community rap stars. But the very last time Yolanda Beasley saw her young brother, he was in tears in the backyard of the rural Virginia household in which they grew up.
Barnes considered anyone was right after him, Beasley recalled him saying at the Xmas Eve 2013 accumulating at their mother’s residence, and he required to “get away from them.”
When she pressed Barnes on what he intended, he responded, “They do not signify me no excellent,” she recalled.
For far more on the slaying of the spouse of an Atlanta DJ, tune in to “Seem and Fury” on “Dateline” at 9 ET/8 CT tonight.
Three weeks right after that ominous trade, early on Jan. 14, Barnes, 38, was gunned down in his driveway in a peaceful Atlanta suburb. Approximately 10 months later, on the early morning of Nov. 23, the wife of a further DJ who labored at the exact location as Barnes — Club Onyx — was fatally shot in a way the detective who investigated the scenario described as an “execution.”
The killings shocked the city’s club scene — and Barnes’ dying marked the conclude of an period for Atlanta hip-hop, as just one tunes writer put it. But the lethal shooting of Tiffany Jackson Pugh was solved: Weeks immediately after her loss of life, her partner, Andre Pugh — regarded as DJ Brilliant — was billed with murder just after authorities reported he questioned a close buddy to carry out the killing.
The pair denied the allegations but were convicted and sentenced to lifestyle in prison without the need of the chance of parole.
Still no suspects have been publicly recognized in Barnes’ killing.
“Everybody remembers January 14th,” Nick Really like, a DJ who labored with Barnes, explained to “Dateline.” “And we even now really don’t have any concrete responses. It’s mad.”
“I want my brother’s killer to be caught,” Beasley explained to NBC News. “My mother desires closure. Our family demands peace. We require justice.”
Capt. John Ivey of the Clayton County Law enforcement Department’s Important Crimes Division did not respond to a comprehensive listing of concerns about Barnes’ killing, but he explained to “Dateline” that he was assigning a detective to critique the situation. Detectives who investigated the killing in 2014 did not reply to requests for remark, nor did a division spokesperson.
‘King between kings’
Beasley, 63, recalled her brother as a usual place child who grew up in a tiny city north of Richmond, Virginia, and used his time fishing, actively playing ball and using bikes with pals. He was also a gifted tinkerer: He at the time designed a go-kart out of a damaged-down lawn mower.
Barnes did not get into new music until eventually he’d moved to Atlanta in his early 20s and started doing work at an automobile detailing shop. There, he noticed people today providing blend CDs from the trunks of their automobiles or backpacks, Beasley stated, and grew to become intrigued with the club scene.
Finally, she stated, he began acquiring secondhand tools, teaching himself to DJ and promoting his own CDs from a rented dwelling in the Atlanta suburbs.
“He learned every thing — just about every talent — by listening and observing many others,” stated Beasley, who also lived in Atlanta at the time.
Barnes’ expertise landed him a gig DJing at 1 of Atlanta’s strip clubs. These had been the venues exactly where aspiring rappers making an attempt to get their songs heard had long sought the focus of the DJ — the gatekeeper who could make or break a vocation.
By 2008, said Really like, who managed a crew that Barnes belonged to, Barnes had turn into a “king between kings” — a DJ identified for his gift of gab, his booming, personalized seem program and his skill to draw enormous crowds flush with income.
“He manufactured most people come to feel like stars,” rapper Jeezy told “Dateline.” “He made these guys that’s coming out of these hoods and these ghettos and coming out of these dire circumstances — he designed them think in themselves.”
Barnes was also known for his integrity. Even though artists paid out DJs to engage in their audio, Like recalled, Barnes demanded excellence.
“Everybody understood that even if you experienced $20, $50, $100, whichever the scenario might be, Nando would seem at your new music, pop it in his headphones, and if it wasn’t poppin’, he hand you your funds back,” Love claimed.
Though making an attempt to set up himself in the early 2000s, Jeezy mentioned he set his sights on getting Barnes to engage in his new music. To begin with, Jeezy recalled, Barnes’ critiques of his content were being brutally sincere: “He employed to simply call me, like, ‘This is whack, this is horrible, figure it out.’”
Sooner or later, Jeezy said, he did, in a collaboration with DJ Drama — “Trap or Die,” unveiled nearly two a long time ago — that Barnes performed in its entirety at an additional strip club, Magic Metropolis. The mixtape reworked Jeezy’s everyday living, catapulting him from the streets to a vocation that took him much beyond Atlanta.
“He literally, one-handedly saved my lifestyle,” Jeezy reported. “He put me in a position to do one thing that I cherished to do, and to make a residing out of it.”
A loss of life captured on video
Beasley’s cellphone rang ahead of dawn on Jan. 14. 2014. It was her brother’s girlfriend, who was with a detective who sent gut-wrenching news: Barnes experienced been fatally shot in entrance of his house in Morrow, around 15 miles south of Atlanta.
Beasley, who experienced moved again to Virginia 4 several years in advance of, straight away drove to Georgia. In people to start with times, she reported, her time was expended dealing with the grim logistics of dying — determining her brother’s overall body, aiding make funeral arrangements, sorting out his affairs.
It wasn’t till a couple of weeks afterwards, she stated, that she offered police with information of the Christmas Eve conversation. When she’d pressed Barnes for names of the people today who he stated he needed to get away from, he’d supplied them, and she explained she shared them with investigators.
Ivey, of the Clayton County Law enforcement Division, did not respond to requests for comment.
Later, Beasley mentioned, investigators questioned her to critique online video of the shooting. The clips had been pulled from her brother’s security technique, she explained, and investigators wanted to know if she recognized the gunman.
Beasley agreed to look at the online video as very long as it was shut off in advance of the shooter pulled the cause, she said. The cameras captured a man casually strolling down the center of the street toward Barnes’ residence at the stop of a cul-de-sac, she mentioned.
“He does not hesitate searching about, like, I need to have to see in which I can go,” she recalled. “This person is strolling straight to Fernando’s residence.”
Beasley reported she did not recognize the gunman, who had a hood pulled more than his head. When he bought to Barnes’ home, she claimed, he walked down the driveway and positioned himself powering bushes.
It was raining, she mentioned, and the gunman remained concealed for a couple several hours.
Barnes arrived property around 3 or 4 a.m., she mentioned, parked and took some products inside of. Authorities instructed her what transpired up coming, she stated: When her brother arrived back again outdoors, the guy emerged from the bushes and ran up powering him.
Beasley didn’t recall if the online video had audio and the gentleman could be read declaring just about anything in advance of he set a gun to Barnes’ head and pulled the set off.
Afterward, Beasley recalled the investigators expressing, the gunman walked absent.
Getting rid of ‘a excellent one’
The impression of Barnes’ dying rippled throughout Atlanta, but it strike the club scene primarily tough, Appreciate claimed. Barnes was not tied up in road organization, he said, so men and women assumed his dying was by some means linked to his operate. Possibly he hadn’t performed someone’s tunes and they’d held a grudge, Like explained. Or possibly Barnes experienced made a joke about an individual who wasn’t in a joking temper, he stated.
“We know so quite a few men and women in this city that are tied up in one thing or an additional — included with perilous people today, involved in hazardous companies,” he mentioned. “Nando wasn’t just one of ‘em. So for the town as a whole, it’s like, ‘Oh, y’all took a great a single away from us.’”
Then, on Nov. 23, Tiffany Jackson Pugh was fatally shot in East Stage, just south of Atlanta. She was in bed and experienced been shot when in the chest and once in the head at shut assortment, according to Allyn Glover, the now-retired East Issue law enforcement detective who investigated the killing.
Her husband, Andre Pugh, labored with Barnes at Club Onyx and carried out as DJ Great. Pugh dialed 911 at 6 a.m. and reported that he uncovered his wife’s system immediately after a residence protection corporation notified him of a feasible split-in.
Initial responders found the couple’s 2-year-old son in mattress with her, even though he was unharmed, Glover explained.
Throughout an job interview with Glover, Pugh advised the investigator that he might have been the supposed goal, and his wife took place to be in the completely wrong location at the mistaken time, video of the interview demonstrates.
“We didn’t know if we experienced a serial murderer on our fingers or an aspiring rapper that is seeking to make a name for themselves and they’re mad simply because Nando and Pugh didn’t perform their tunes,” Glover reported. “That was 1 of the avenues we had to pay a visit to.”
But authorities discovered evidence that sent them on a unique path in Jackson Pugh’s killing. Cellphone details showed that a shut close friend of Pugh’s was near the couple’s dwelling all-around the time of the murder, as was Pugh.
‘We desperately have to have justice’
Textual content messages involving Pugh and his wife showed a troubled connection, Fulton County Deputy District Attorney Pat Dutcher explained to “Dateline.” He’d had associations with other girls and she had threatened to leave, Dutcher mentioned, still he was struggling fiscally and often depended on her to spend his expenditures.
Pugh and his friend, Adrian Harley, had been arrested that December and accused of carrying out a murder-for-seek the services of — an event that prompted a flood of calls to Barnes’ family from folks who puzzled if the pair might have been connected to his killing. (Neither Pugh nor Harley have been accused of a criminal offense in relationship with Barnes’ demise.)
“My mother and I are inquiring if an arrest is designed that She or I be the to start with to know,” Beasley wrote in an electronic mail right after the December arrests to a detective investigating her brother’s scenario. “We have been as a result of so considerably there has been no peace and we desperately need to have justice and closure.”
In a created reaction to Beasley, the detective indicated that Pugh required to converse and the department was sending someone to interview him. In the e-mail, which Beasley supplied to NBC Information, he also explained the FBI was helping.
“I will hold you knowledgeable on any updates,” the detective wrote. “I will make absolutely sure we get in touch with you and your mother very first on an arrest.”
Seven times later, Beasley requested for an update, in accordance to an e-mail she furnished to NBC Information. She stated she never ever read back — and hasn’t listened to anything at all from the department in the ten years because.
It is not apparent if the law enforcement job interview with Pugh at any time occurred. The detective with whom Beasley corresponded did not respond to a request for comment. Pugh’s trial and appellate attorneys would not remark. A law firm for Harley explained to “Dateline” that he saw no evidence of his client’s involvement in Barnes’ killing.
A spokesperson for the FBI’s Atlanta field place of work mentioned it didn’t surface that the company was ever associated in the investigation.
Glover explained he hopes investigators in Clayton County will just take another glance at Barnes’ circumstance. He puzzled if they experienced reviewed cellphone facts in the spot at the time of the killing, and he recalled that when both of those Barnes and Pugh have been DJs at Club Onyx, Barnes occupied a busier, extra valuable night, Friday. And in the several hours after Barnes’ killing, Pugh asked for the DJ’s time slot, Glover recalled learning from the club’s administration.
Sabrena Swinger, who supervised Onyx’s dancers, informed “Dateline” that she recalled listening to Pugh make the request. Afterward, Swinger explained, Pugh DJ’d a single Friday night, but the club employed an individual else to change Barnes going ahead.
Andre’s attorneys would not remark on the ask for and Ivey did not reply to requests for remark.
