Text size:

Who killed rapper "Young Noddo" ?

By Pervaiz Shallwani | Special to Newsday

7:07 PM EDT, May 2, 2008

As family members and friends grieved the loss of an 18-year-old budding hip-hop artist, police on Friday continued to search for at least one and up to three suspects involved in the stabbing that killed the rapper known as "Young Noddo" outside a Bushwick brownstone Thursday evening.

Among the motives for the stabbing that killed Renato Scantlebury, police are investigating what family members said were jealousies over his growing rap stardom and an alleged fight he had with two other teens an hour before he was stabbed. Scantlebury's mother is a police officer who works in the recruitment division at New York Police Department headquarters in Manhattan.

At the modest red brick duplex on Kosciuszko Street, roughly 10 blocks from where he was stabbed, grieving friends and family members remembered Scantlebury as "a family guy," and an accomplished cook whose signature dish was "cheesy grits." He was set to graduate from Brooklyn Leaders high school this summer.

"[HIS MOTHER] is destroyed," said Antoinette Bowens, Scantlebury's aunt. "It is her only son. "You can't even explain in word how the family is feeling."

Another aunt, Sabrina Williams, described her nephew as a "good child" who "did not live by the streets."

According to police, Scanltebury was stabbed in the neck, chest and abdomen on the sidewalk outside 1160 Gates Avenue around 6 p.m., and stumbled up the steps before collapsing in the hallway of the building. He was taken to Woodhull Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

The superintendent of the building, Floyd Michael, 44, said about an hour before the stabbing, Scantlebury had been in a fistfight with two teens. According to Michael, Scantlebury made a remark about a "Team Fresh" t-shirt both teens were wearing, which escalated into shouting and then punches.

Michael said Scantlebury told the teens there was "going to be no more Team Fresh. It's going to be Team Fry," a group in the neighborhood, some of whose fans yesterday offered condolences to Noddo on the social networking website Myspace.

"I was here for the first fight and stopped it right away," Michael said. "He was only playing."

After the two teens left, Michael said he went to a nearby McDonald's and returned about 30 minutes later to find him "lying in the door."

"It is pitiful," Michael said. "He was a good friend of mine. If I'd have come back and caught it in time, I would have stopped it."

Yesterday afternoon a candle-lit memorial with a photocopy of Scantlebury's album cover was propped on the street a few feet from where the stabbing occured.

Scantlebury recently released a self-produced album titled "Ya Boy Noddo iz Here," with the photo of a young, skinny teen sporting a New York Yankees cap.

A friend of the family, police officer J. Breleur, described the album as a clean record with about 10 songs that dealt more with "life lessons" from his own upbringing.

"He just put it out," Breleur said. "He was going to sell his own CDs. It was clean."

Staff writer Rocco Parascandola contributed to this report.

--