LGP Qua rapped against the gun violence that claimed his life, and now we mourn — again

I can’t help but wonder what lyrics Qidere Johnson — a Philadelphia rapper known for his powerful verses condemning gun violence — would have penned about this moment.

Since his death on May 11 — Mother’s Day — a pall has hung over his favorite corners of the city like a storm cloud: heavy with grief, thick with sorrow, and stretching all the way from the North Philly neighborhood where he grew up to City Hall.

Better known as LGP Qua, Johnson, 30, was shot and killed during an attempted robbery in Feltonville, near M and Luzerne Streets. Police say two masked men tried to rob him and a friend. One shot Johnson in the chest while trying to snatch his gold chains. No suspects have been arrested in the shooting.

Johnson called himself the “voice of the youth,” yet his take on this moment is a verse left forever unwritten.

For years, he honed his musical craft through hard-earned lessons of the streets, which he shared in the hopes that they would help guide the next generation. It was an approach that was not unlike one of his musical heroes, Jay-Z, who once famously rapped: “… Hov did that/ So hopefully you won’t have to go through that.”

Like many other socially conscious rappers, Johnson was as attuned to the struggles that were immediately around him as he was to the larger world beyond Philadelphia’s borders. That depth caught the attention of notable musicians, including Meek Mill, Gillie Da King, and Freeway, who publicly mourned him.

I still remember the time I heard Johnson echo one of my columns in one of his 2017 raps — an indictment of the city’s apathetic reaction to the deaths of its youth.

Johnson didn’t just call out the killings. He responded with fury to a reality many had just accepted as inevitable.

“I read the newspaper, had me sick to my stomach.

“Twenty kids got killed, nobody made it to see 20/ The sad part about it, they only getting younger … Ain’t no fistfights, only gunfights … The streets will get you killed … Here one minute, gone the next second.”

Gun violence in Philadelphia has dramatically declined from the historically high number of shooting incidents and homicides that defined the COVID-19 pandemic. As of Thursday, 78 people had been killed this year. That’s more than a 60% drop from the same period in 2021, the height of the gun violence crisis — the city’s other pandemic.

At a glance, the numbers suggest progress. City officials tout the trend lines, eager to prove the city is “doing better.”

But zoom in, and the picture sharpens as the data blur. What emerges is a truth we know too well: lives still lost, futures still erased, trauma that not even the best numbers can heal.

Barely 24 hours before Johnson was killed, 12-year-old Ethan Parker was shot and killed while recording music with his brother at a neighbor’s home in West Oak Lane.

He became the youngest shooting fatality in the city so far this year — one of more than 40 young people shot in 2025. A 17-year-old, who police say unintentionally fired the gun, has been charged.

Hours later, three teens on a SEPTA bus got into an argument with a 52-year-old man who, police say, pulled a gun and opened fire — injuring all three, along with a bystander.

A couple of weeks before that chaotic day, on May 2, a rookie Philadelphia police officer was critically wounded after a 30-year-old man showed up to a brawl outside Overbrook High School with a gun and fired into the crowd.

Three snapshots. One looming crisis, and despite the falling shooting and homicide rates, truths laid bare:

Too many guns.

Too few safely locked away.

Too many adults modeling violence.

And, always, too many young lives stolen.

To the mothers who bury their children, to the children left fatherless — including Johnson’s 6-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter — to the loved ones who crowd church pews and hold candlelit vigils and balloon releases, to all of us here in Philadelphia, I wonder what those declining numbers mean.

They meant nothing to Tamara Davis, Johnson’s mother, who stood shattered before City Council as Council President Kenyatta Johnson on Thursday introduced a resolution to honor her son — her only child — for his music, but also for his advocacy on the same city streets he grew up on.

“I just want to say, ‘I love my son,’” Davis said.

Those declining crime stats meant nothing to Johnson’s cousin, Keisha Washington, who stood beside family and friends during the City Council meeting and said through tears, “This can’t keep happening.”

And yet, it does — and with it calls demanding change that has yet to come.

I think that’s why Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke’s invocation, delivered before the day’s session, stuck with me:

“We repeat, almost addictively, the same patterns that produce and reproduce violence and suffering and emotional immaturity and low self-esteem and far too many premature deaths in our city.”

LGP Qua spoke up when other young people wouldn’t or couldn’t.

Now that voice is silenced.

How many more verses will be left unwritten before we finally listen?