Instead of a celebration, the evening turned into a night of heartbreak and horror for up-and-coming Chicago rapper Mello Buckzz. On the evening of July 2, 2025, her album release party at Artis Lounge in downtown Chicago became a tragic crime scene as gunfire erupted moments after the soiree spilled into the street.
Just before 11 p.m., when club patrons began to pour out onto the street and assemble outside, a dark-colored car reportedly rolled up and in an instant, without provocation, one or more people opened fire at the crowd. The consequences were chilling: Four people died and 14 others were wounded. The dead included a 24-year-old man, a 25-year-old man, and two women. At least three women remain in critical condition, authorities said. The victims were overwhelmingly young adults, between 21 and 32 years old.
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For Mello Buckzz, the tragedy struck even closer to home. The rapper, sources say, lost two of the most important people in her life, both her boyfriend and her best friend, in the carnage, two people who, in an instant, were gone, taken from her during a time that should’ve been one of her proudest moments.
Her anguish resonated in a series of raw and heart-wrenching posts on Instagram Stories. In one video, she caught a moment of bliss with her boyfriend, writing, “We were having so much fun... we couldn’t leave each other alone.” It was gut-wrenching, the juxtaposition between that moment and the reality today.
“My heart hurt so bad,” she wrote. In another post, she wrote, with a photograph of her friend, “I can’t believe I lost both y’all in 1 night.” Her grief, posted with an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness intensity, unfurled: “I don’t wish this typa pain on nobody… Dam my f###### crew,” she wrote, the anger and sadness seeping through each word.
While flashing police lights illuminated the sidewalk along Clark Street in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood and paramedics bumped over the curb to treat the wounded, investigators have started piecing together what led to the attack. As of Thursday, July 3, 2025, no arrests had been made in the case, and no suspect description was available from the police, and the reason for the shooting is unclear.
That moment was meant to be a milestone evening in the career of one of the city’s rising voices, and instead added another chapter in the city’s long, tortured story of gun violence. It’s a brutal reminder of how quickly joy can turn to devastation and how fragile it can be, even in our brightest moments.
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