Rapper Lil Reese Was Shot in Parking Garage Gunfight in Chicago — Is He OK?

Rapper Lil Reese is alive but wounded after a shootout in Chicago on Saturday, May 15. And Saturday’s incident marks the second time in as many years that this star of Chicago’s drill scene was shot.

According to the Chicago Tribune, authorities said Lil Reese — who’s well-known for his featured appearance on Chief Keef’s 2012 single “I Don’t Like” — was one of three gunshot victims from a gunfight over a stolen car in a parking garage in the city’s Near North Side.

First responders got a call reporting three gunshot victims around 9:50 a.m. on Saturday, the Tribune reports. A 20-year-old was shot twice in the knee and taken to a local hospital in good condition, a 27-year-old was wounded multiple times and hospitalized in critical condition, and a 28-year-old — later identified as Lil Reese — was grazed in the eye and hospitalized in fair condition.

“Apparently, they were all shooting at each other,” Chicago Police spokeswoman Sally Bown said, citing preliminary intel from the incident.

According to police reports, a man tracked his son’s stolen Dodge Durango to the parking garage and tried to detain the people inside. Then an assailant opened fire on the Durango, and the vehicle crashed into a pillar in the garage. Police sources told the Tribune that the occupants of the Durango “exchanged” gunfire with someone outside the vehicle.

Lil Reese, born Tavares Taylor, told the police that he met the Durango occupants outside the garage and directed them to a spot where they could sell cannabis to him, according to the police report.

The Tribune also reports that a graphic video of the shooting’s aftermath is making the rounds on social media. In the clip, a man wearing blood-stained pants walks out of a parking garage, another man leans against a wall, and a third man resembling Lil Reese breathes heavily and appears to be going in and out of consciousness as a police officer talks to him. 

“That [expletive] stole my car!” a man says in a video.

“Look at Lil Reese! Look at Lil Reese!” a woman says.

TMZ also posted photos of the Dodge Durango at the crime scene, showing the car riddled with bullets and seemingly totaled from the collision with the pillar.

A post on Lil Reese’s Instagram Stories on Saturday night read, “Everyone keep praying for Reese and his family.”

In November 2019, Lil Reese was shot in the neck and critically wounded at an intersection in Country Club Hills, Ill. — a southern suburb of Chicago — when someone got out of a sedan with an AK-47 assault rifle and fired around two dozen rounds, according to the Tribune.

The rapper was released from the hospital a few days later, and he thanked his supporters on Twitter nearly a week after the shooting. “I appreciate everybody keeping me in their prayers, though, I can’t lie,” he tweeted at the time. “Thank y’all. No matter what you do out here, always talk to God.”