NEW YORK — A 16-year-old Bronx boy accused of shooting a cop during a struggle over the teen’s stolen gun is the rising rap star C Blu — and a close associate of Kay Flock, the popular hip-hop artist recently arrested for murder, the New York Daily News has learned.
Camrin Williams, known as C Blu in the Bronx drill rap scene, has multiple hit songs on YouTube, some with more than 1 million views.
Cops say he was part of a “disorderly crowd” of people outside a building on Lorillard Place near Third Ave. After refusing orders from police to take his hands out of his pockets, the young musician allegedly began to fight with an officer. During the tussle he fired one round through his own leg before the same bullet grazed Officer Kaseem Pennant in the leg, according to police.
During his arraignment in Bronx Supreme Court, Assistant District Attorney Joseph Maniscalco said C Blu was on probation for gun possession when the cop was shot. He said the rapper, who is in the 11th grade, frequently showed off guns and cash.
“This defendant has taken to social media and appeared multiple times displaying a firearm that looks similar to the firearm he possessed in the incident,” Maniscalco said.
C Blu pleaded not guilty to criminal possession of a weapon, second-degree assault and other weapons charges. His attorney, Dawn Florio, said cops had piled on C Blu for no reason. During the scrum a gun went off — but the rapper didn’t pull the trigger, she said.
“My client never touched the gun,” Florio said, describing a video of the incident. “You could hear the people saying that they thought the police officer shot my client.”
Florio, who previously represented rapper Tekashi69, said the cops went after C Blu simply because “they know he’s an artist. He’s very popular.” She said the previous gun case was the result of an unloaded firearm C Blu used as a prop in a music video.
A judge imposed $200,000 bail.
The arraignment represented a drastic change of circumstances for the Bronx teen who was a book-smart student when he allegedly got into the gang life — and began blowing up as a teen hip-hop star.
“I’m on my school s--- still. You gotta be smart ... I want to be a biochemist, besides this rapping s---,” C Blu said in a YouTube interview earlier this month, adding that he wanted to go to college. “I was really into science.”
But along the way he started making beats with his friends and listening to rappers like Lil Pump.
He wrote lyrics about buying guns and taking on opposition gangs in the Bronx.
“Bought a new Glock, this s--t came with a beam. No, I can’t miss, all I shoot is greens,” he raps in one song called “No Ozone Part 2.”
“Keep me a .22, it fit in my pocket. Mask on just in case that I flock it,” he spits in another called “Not a Diss.”
He started being home-schooled in November because his fame had become a distraction at high school, Florio said.
A friend from the neighborhood was Kay Flock, the budding 18-year-old drill star who was arrested in December on murder charges for allegedly shooting a man outside a Manhattan barber shop.
C Blu recently signed with Interscope Records and received “a very large advance in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Florio said.
He was featured on numerous Kay Flock songs but got quiet when asked about his friend’s murder case in the recent interview.
“Free bro,” C Blu said, declining to say whether or not he’d spoken to the rapper, whose real name is Kevin Perez, since the arrest.
C Blu said his goal in rap is to make enough money to move his mother out of the “hood.”
A relative, believed to be C Blu’s mother, angrily refused to talk Wednesday when she opened the door to the family’s apartment a half mile from the scene of the shooting.
“Get the f--- away from my door,” the woman told a reporter. “We’re not answering no stories, no way, bro.”
Before the arrest, C Blu appeared to be approaching the upper echelons of the city’s popular drill rap scene, which has produced rappers like Sheff G and the late Pop Smoke.
Prosecutors say he is a member of the Reyway crew, a subset of the Crips.
The rapper and wounded officer were hospitalized at nearby St. Barnabas Hospital. The cop was released from the hospital Wednesday.
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Liam Quigley contributed to this story.
