Stage fright

A fight broke out, a gun went off and a well-known Sacramento rapper was shot in the leg.

The incident happened on Friday, February 20, at Silk II nightclub in Rancho Cordova around midnight. According to witnesses, 30-year-old rapper and promoter Hondo Green was performing onstage when an altercation erupted in the audience between two females. Green stopped his set, jumped off the stage and tried to break up the fight by grabbing one of the girls and ushering her out the front door. After a brief struggle, a group of unidentified men attacked the rapper.

Seconds later, a gunshot went off and panic ensued. Before the police could arrive, friends put the rapper in a car and sped him off to a local hospital.

A day later, Green’s leg was amputated.

Green’s wife, Dana Green, was at the club the night of the incident and said the shooting was senseless and not gang-related; her husband was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Fellow rapper and Everyday Fight for Unity promoter E-Moe was also at the club. “The environment [at these shows] is respecting hip-hop. This night, some niggas came and they didn’t want to let it be that simple. Some females started fighting inside the club. … Hondo jumped off the stage and did the security thing. He grabbed one girl, somebody else grabbed the other girl. … Once they got outside, I can’t speculate on what happened.”

According to Sgt. Tim Curran of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, officers received a call at about 12:15 a.m. regarding a shooting at the club. When police arrived, friends already had transported Green to the UC Davis Medical Center. Witnesses didn’t want to talk.

“We stopped a number of people, but nobody was detained,” Curran explains. “Not much cooperation; nobody saw or heard anything.”

Silk II, a club that’s opened its doors to hip-hop, even when other venues seemed to shy away from the genre, is now permanently shut down because of the shooting. According to Sgt. Curran, this is the first time in the past six months that the police responded to a call at the venue.

According to his wife, Green was “born and raised in Chicago’s worst projects.” When he came to Sacramento at the age of 18 with his two kids, all he wanted to do was to focus on music.

But trouble seems to follow the aspiring rapper.

In October 2007, while trying to sell his latest CD at AM/PM on 16th Street downtown, two men harassed him about gang affiliation. Sensing trouble, Green offered the men a free CD. Instead of accepting the gift, one of the men stabbed Green 22 times.

“Sacramento’s crazy,” Dana says. In fact, the city’s reputation for violence led her and her husband to start Everyday Fight for Unity, a promotion company that seeks to unite the city’s artists and decrease violence through hip-hop.

“We try to bring unity,” she says. “We try to bring different people together to form something beautiful.”