Rapper Half Ounce fatally shot in the latest slaying of a musician in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES — The city already had a notorious history for rappers, and in the last month at least two more artists have been slain here.

Latauriisha O’Brien, 32, who performed under the name “Half Ounce,” was found fatally shot late Monday, police and his family said, the latest of several rap notables who have been killed in Los Angeles in the past two years.

Los Angeles police said officers responded to multiple calls of shots fired around 11:30 a.m. in the Koreatown neighborhood and found a man who had fatally shot in front of an apartment building.

The slain man’s family confirmed to NBC Los Angeles that the person killed was O’Brien, a father of three who worked at UPS while he attended school.

The Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office also confirmed that O’Brien was the victim. An examination was pending Tuesday, an office spokesperson said.

Police officials said that the investigation was in its early stages and that a motive was unknown. Investigators are looking for a man wearing dark clothing who fled south from the crime scene on New Hampshire Avenue in a dark SUV.

Monday’s killing occurred three weeks after rapper PnB Rock was shot and killed in a botched robbery at Roscoe’s Chicken ’N Waffles in South Los Angeles. Three people, including a 17-year-old and his father, have been arrested and charged in the Sept. 12 killing.

In December, rapper Drakeo the Ruler, whose real name was Darrell Caldwell, died after he was stabbed during a fight behind the main stage at Banc of California Stadium during the Once Upon a Time in LA music festival.

Brooklyn, New York, rapper Pop Smoke, whose real name was Bashar Barakah Jackson, was shot and killed in a reported home invasion in Los Angeles on Feb. 19, 2020, while he was in Los Angeles on a business trip.

Four people, two of them juveniles, were charged in that case.

In March 2019, Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hussle was shot and killed outside his South Los Angeles clothing store. In July, Eric R. Holder Jr. was found guilty of first-degree murder in Hussle’s slaying.

It has been 25 years since the rapper known as Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls was gunned down in a car-to-car shooting March 9, 1997.

The shooting of the rapper, whose real name was Christopher Wallace, has never been solved.

It happened following a party at the Petersen Auto Museum in the Mid City neighborhood of Los Angeles in what is believed to have been the crescendo of a building feud between East Coast and West Coast rap artists.

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