Ellie Rushing, from her Twitter profile.
If there’s one thing of which no one can accuse Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing it’s laziness. Her author profile states that her beat is “cover(ing) criminal justice and law enforcement in Philadelphia, including how crime and the court systems impact communities,” and there’s certainly plenty of that in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia.
Miss Rushing gave us a deep look into the West Philly gang Young Bag Chasers, about whom we have nine times previously noted. Despite the fact that we were reliably informed by the newspaper that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, and that we have previously reported that the newspaper really, really, really doesn’t like to refer to gangs as gangs, Miss Rushing, though using other descriptions occasionally for prosaic reasons, does refer to “YBC” as a gang occasionally.
But, sadly enough, in a very in-depth article, one that the research of which must have put the reporter in some physical danger, Miss Rushing gives us far too many excuses as to how and why the gang became a gang and the gang members became gang members.
The rise and fall of the Young Bag Chasers
They started as kids from West Philly just trying to make it out. The lure of drill music, fame, and money left nearly a dozen dead, and others in prison for decades.
by Ellie Rushing | Tuesday, March 18, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT
The gunmen sat in the parking lot of a North Philadelphia McDonald’s, their eyes fixed on the door. They were waiting for Zyir Stafford to finish his shift.
Stafford walked out into the cool, damp air just after 8:15 p.m. on Dec. 7, 2023. He would not make it two blocks before he was shot more than a dozen times. He died at a nearby hospital shortly after, his work uniform riddled with bullets and soaked in blood.
Members of the Young Bag Chasers, a West Philadelphia gang, quickly claimed responsibility for the killing online and began mocking Stafford in rap songs and social media posts.
Abdul Vicks, a rapper considered the leader of YBC, slapped the McDonald’s name and logo on his song titles, album covers, and the packages of weed he sold. He filmed a music video in which he pretended to pull a body from the trunk of a car, then lit a fire next to it, and poured McDonald’s fries into the flames.
The author then gave us a few paragraphs telling us how the West Philly gang discovered that rap videos like this actually made money for them, and that the one mentioned above has been seen online more than five million times. Standard reportorial stuff.
But then we come to this:
The Young Bag Chasers, named after the teens’ initial pursuit of money, didn’t start out as even a shadow of the vicious clique it would become. It all began around 2017 when best friends from West Philly started making music for fun, writing songs in their basements and bedrooms that they hoped could one day bring them a career, riches, and a life outside their struggling neighborhood.
But then a string of shootings and the rise of social media and drill rap, a subgenre of hip-hop that celebrates violence, scrambled their intentions — and altered the trajectory of their young lives.
“We were young, we didn’t know what we getting into,” said Kavon “Von” Lee, 24. “And a lot of people ain’t had no guidance.”
I call bovine feces on that! They didn’t know what they were doing? They had no guidance? Mr Lee was making ridiculous excuses, because there’s no way on God’s earth that they didn’t know and understand that shooting people, that murder, is just plain wrong.
Miss Rushing continued to tell us that YBC suffered its own casualties, that many have now gone to their eternal rewards — my expression; she did not put it like that — and several others were serving long prison terms. That Mr Lee, shown above, was sentenced to only 20-to-40 years for murder, rather than life in prison without the possibility of parole, is repugnant. He could get out at while still in his 40s, but his victim will still be stone-cold graveyard dead.
Then the excuses started:
But in the beginning, it was just a group of neighborhood kids who formed an unbreakable allegiance through shared struggles. Exposed to hard realities and difficult home lives, some said they started selling drugs at 9 or 10 years old, just to survive. Everything escalated from there, they said — theft, fights in school, carrying a gun, dropping out.
It was a simple path, really, one young man said. First, they’re introduced to the scales. Then, the mask and the gun.
And then, in the digital age of drill rap and social media, they pick up a microphone.
The boys became friends by proximity. Most attended Belmont Charter School, and grew up on nearby blocks in the Bottom, a part of West Philadelphia cutting across Mantua, Belmont, and West Powelton that for decades has been among the poorest sections of the city. The typical household there earns less than $34,000 per year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census.
They spent their summers and afternoons riding bikes through overgrown alleys and shooting hoops at 39th Street Playground. They wrestled and played football for the Parkside Saints and, at night, piled onto the floors of one another’s homes for sleepovers.
They proudly called themselves Bottom Boys. And they loved one another like brothers.
Many had fathers who were dead, incarcerated, or absent. Some had parents who used drugs, and relatives that sold them. Most lived below the poverty line, shared clothes and meals, and saw each other’s mothers and grandmothers as their own. After one boy’s parents died, Lee said, he and his friends had to sign him up for school. They were 12.
“We rely on each other like family,” Lee said. “It’s the only way to get by.”
I’m sorry, give me a couple of minutes to wipe the tears from my eyes.
If “many” had fathers who were dead or locked up, didn’t they realize that going down the same criminal path meant that they’d almost certainly wind up dead or locked up? Yes, their fathers weren’t there, but didn’t the mothers and grandmothers they saw as their own tell them what could and almost certainly would happen. Yes, they were poor and black, but Miss Rushing told us that the gang started in 2017, just after Barack Hussein Obama had finished eight years as President of the United States, and proved that a young black man, if he stayed in school and didn’t do stupid [insert vulgar term for feces here], could become wealthy and rise as far as it was possible to rise in this country?
Then came the real litany of excuses:
Their neighborhood had been shaped by decades of structural racism. It was redlined in the 1930s and deemed “hazardous” to investors, ushering in an era of economic and racial segregation. In the decades to follow, Black families were crushed by the crack epidemic and subsequent mass incarceration.
Decrepit and abandoned homes lined many blocks where the boys played. Trash littered the sidewalks. Their schools were overcrowded and underfunded.
Oh, woe is thee! I grew up without a father as well, one who took off when I was in the second grade, and my two younger sisters were four and 2½, but I never killed anyone. Somehow, some way, despite my mother being gone ten hours a day to work, I always knew, as did my sisters, that killing someone, that robbing people and other stupid stuff could get you locked up. I went to a high school with thirty kids to a class, and only one teacher had his Master’s degree. There were no teachers’ aides. It’s true that the sidewalks and streets weren’t littered with trash, but that’s something of which the neighborhood took care, not the city.
There are dozens more paragraphs, detailing not only YBC’s descent into outright gang-bangers, but this one amused me:
(Abdul) Vicks’ (street name: YBC Dul) songs were so relentlessly cruel that his fans nicknamed him “Mr. Disrespectful.” He even rapped about slapping a 16-year-old victim’s mother, and mixed snippets of speeches by District Attorney Larry Krasner into the songs.
That’s all you need to know that the gang-bangers knew that Philly’s George Soros-sponsored, police-hating and criminal-loving prosecutor was really their friend due to his lenient prosecutions.
Miss Rushing’s article is pretty long, and if you aren’t a subscriber you can access only a few articles a month before the paywall slams down, but it details a culture that not only loves the gang violence, yet brings in money from the hangers-on and wannabes, and from an audience that likes and celebrates that culture. The reporter never quite put it that way, and really never said anything at all about that culture other than to note that the gang-bangers were making money selling drugs, making ‘rap’ vidiots, and they needed ‘blood,’ or ‘bodies’ for their inspiration and new material. Western civilization seemingly has no meaning for them. Sadly, given how many non-gangsters from otherwise decent neighborhoods and families champion Hamas and the Palestinians against the civilized country Israel and Jews in general, that problem can only spread.
