The indictment of West Philly gang the Young Bag Chasers was building for years. Even members saw it coming.

Abdul Vicks could see the writing on the wall.

“I can smell indictments, I can see it comin’,” Vicks, better known as YBC Dul, rapped in a song released last fall.

At the time, it read as bravado. Another taunt to feed his mythology.

But he was right. By the time the song dropped in November, an investigation into his crew, the Young Bag Chasers, had been quietly building for nearly two years.

» READ MORE: The rise and fall of the Young Bag Chasers

Vicks died before he could see the lyrics materialize. He was shot and killed in August 2024.

Last month, the indictment he had expected arrived. After a secret, yearslong grand jury probe, prosecutors charged 19 people tied to YBC and its affiliated and rival crews with nearly two dozen killings and shootings since 2022, violence that investigators say was often celebrated online and turned into profit through music and social media posts.

It marked the latest chapter in the unraveling of the West Philadelphia crew — teen friends who started making music in their basements and, investigators say, morphed into a violent gang that killed for clout.

Prosecutors and detectives, in interviews, said they spent two years combing through cell phone records, ballistic evidence, social media posts, and music videos to tie the cases together.

Officials declined to discuss details of specific crimes, citing the sensitive nature of the indictment, which remains sealed, but they described a central motivation behind the case: stopping the social monetization of murder.

Assistant District Attorney William Fritze, who supervised the investigation through the Gun Violence Task Force, said that dynamic was clearest in the killing of Zyir Stafford.

Stafford, a 20-year-old father of two, was gunned down while leaving his job at a North Philadelphia McDonald’s in December 2023. Stafford was not directly involved in YBC’s ongoing feud with the rival crew CCK, but his brother was, and so he was targeted for it.

After Stafford, still in his McDonald’s uniform, was shot multiple times near 29th and Clearfield Streets, YBC members immediately took credit for the killing and mocked Stafford online. Vicks released a music video where he visits a McDonald’s, then appears to pull a body from the trunk of a car, light it on fire, and pour McDonald’s fries into the flames. YBC even planned to sell weed out of Happy Meal boxes.

The imagery quickly went viral, driving up YBC’s views on YouTube and Spotify — and the money that came with it.

It appalled law enforcement.

“They weren’t laughing in the face of death. They were laughing at death,” Fritze said. “It’s morally corrupt. It’s like everything that’s anti-society.”

For detectives trying to untangle the violence, the investigation did not begin with a single case.

It started with a name that kept appearing again and again: YBC.

Detective David Gannone had seen it while finishing a long-term investigation with the Gun Violence Task Force into a separate Southwest Philadelphia gang called 02da4 in 2022.

Around the same time, Detective Ryan Moore, of Southwest Detectives, kept encountering young men linked to YBC while investigating shootings in Mantua.

At first, the connections were loose — rumors, overlapping associates, the same names popping up in different cases. During the 02da4 investigation, Gannone said, he developed “decent knowledge” that member Anthony Lacey-Woodson was involved in the December 2022 killing of Tahjae Brooks, a rapper and founder of YBC. But there was not enough evidence to charge him.

At the time, Philadelphia was in the midst of a historic surge in gun violence. Police often lacked the time and resources to dig deeply into connections between rival crews as shootings piled up.

Meanwhile, YBC’s reputation was growing online as Vicks and his crew bragged about killings and taunted shooting victims by name in their raps. Even as some members were arrested and sentenced to decades in prison, the violence continued — and drove up views on their songs.

Vicks and other members were making tens of thousands of dollars from their music and weed sales.

In December 2023, Gannone and Moore — then assigned to a subset of the nonfatal shooting unit — started planning with prosecutors and police leadership about homing in on unsolved crimes linked to YBC.

By the following month, they were detailed to work with the Gun Violence Task Force and investigate YBC full-time.

They started poring over old cases that were suspected of being linked to the group’s feuds, they said, chasing down old leads, reviewing video, pulling social media records, and rewatching music videos to identify members.

“You start pulling out one thread, and then you’d get 100,” said Assistant District Attorney Anna Walters, who worked on the case.

The killing of Zyir Stafford remained a central focus, Walters said — the brazen nature, and the way it was mocked online, underscored what they believed the feud had become.

Then, as the investigation gained momentum, one of YBC’s most visible figures was killed.

Vicks was gunned down in a car in August 2024.

Moore and Gannone declined to say whether Vicks might have been indicted if he were alive today, or whether they found evidence that linked him to shootings.

“That would be up to a grand jury,” Moore said, adding that there are still unsolved cases connected to the group.

Fritze said Vicks was a target of the investigation, but his death did not change its direction.

“This group wasn’t about one person, it was about a lot of victims that needed justice, and so it didn’t matter if Abdul Vicks died, we were going to solve those cases that needed to be solved,” he said.

They were concerned that his death could lead to retaliatory violence — but that never happened, he said.

“This goes back to that whole loyalty thing and how these groups are shaped,” he said. “Maybe he wasn’t as important to them as he thought.”

Other YBC members, prosecutors said, stayed largely out of the public eye while getting away with shootings for years. Jymir Burbage, or Lil Mir, and Stephen Weddington, also known as Baby Yopp, shot and killed Stafford in 2023, as well as Qaadir Cheeks the following May, police said.

Burbage is also accused of five nonfatal shootings, while Weddington has been charged with a third killing and two shootings as part of the indictment.

Their involvement with YBC was not always obvious, investigators said — they did not rap, and often appeared in the background of songs, masked up and with sunglasses on.

Both were arrested outside of Philadelphia last month. Weddington had moved to Absecon, N.J., and was starting a life with his girlfriend and newborn child, while Burbage was found in a motel in South Bend, Ind., officials said.

Investigators also linked rival crews to the killings of two YBC affiliates.

CCK members Ronnie Vincent-Quan, Herman Stigall, and Lacey-Woodson, aka “Pistol P,” have been charged with killing Brooks, the founding YBC rapper, in 2022. And Parkside member Markees Muhammad has been charged with killing YBC affiliate Kameir “T.O.” Scott six months later.

The cases came together slowly, years after the bloodstains had washed away.

“Ballistic evidence and digital footprints solved the cases,” Fritze said. “What people don’t realize is the level of sophistication that the task force is using now. … If you were doing anything with an electronic device connected to the internet, you should probably be aware … we know.“

He declined to specify what that entailed: “You have to think of all the components of your daily life that go into using some sort of digital footprint. And I think that is what we’ve gotten really good at figuring out.”

Ten years ago, Moore and Gannone said, some of the investigative tools used to solve these cases did not exist.

But neither, they said, did the social media landscape that fueled the shootings.