Lil Durk is facing serious murder-for-hire charges involving the killing of Quando Rondo‘s cousin Saviay’a Robinson, but one bit of the prosecution’s case just met a serious challenge from engineer and producer jusvibes.
The engineer, real name Justin Gibson, has been working with Durk since 2021 and describes himself as the Chicago artist’s “main sound engineer” — a claim that photo evidence bears out.
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Gibson submitted an affidavit and supporting screenshots to the court on Sunday (December 15) that appeared to poke holes in the government’s theory that Durk “sought to commercialize” Robinson’s death by rapping about it.
Prosecutors said that lyrics on Durk’s track with Babyface Ray “Wonderful Wayne and Jackie Boy” referenced audio from a news clip “taken shortly after [Robinson’s] murder where [Quando Rondo] screamed ‘no, no!’ after seeing [Robinson’s] dead body.” They pointed specifically to the lyrics: “Look on the news and see your son/ You screamin’, ‘No, no’.”
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However, Gibson says in his affidavit, viewed by HipHopDX, that he watched Durk write his verse in the studio, and recorded the rapper’s verse, during a session on January 25, 2022 — almost seven months before Robinson was killed.
Gibson attached screenshots showing that he had saved a rough draft of the track (originally titled “2 Toxic”) on the date he described.
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Durk is being connected to more crimes than just Robinson’s killing, however: he has recently been linked to the killing of an alleged Chicago gang leader.
Newly unsealed court documents claim the rapper (real name Durk Banks) funded the January 2022 shooting death of Stephon Mack, the alleged leader of the Smashville faction of the Gangster Disciples.
The killing is believed to have been payback for the murder of Durk’s brother Dontay “DThang” Banks, who was shot to death outside a nightclub in Harvey, Illinois in 2021.
“Lil Durk was and still is offering money for people to kill those responsible for his brother’s murder, and more specifically, offering to pay money for any Gangster Disciple that is killed,” a federal agent wrote in the filing, which was submitted in April 2023 but unsealed on Wednesday (December 11).
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Durk has not been charged in connection with Mack’s murder, although police sources told the Chicago Tribune that an investigation is still ongoing.
