KC rapper’s friend worried about his safety. ‘All I felt in his presence was death’
A few weeks before Kansas City rapper Vonza Watson was shot to death at a waterfront bar at the Lake of the Ozarks on Memorial Day weekend, a friend had a dark premonition as they lounged on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
“All I felt in his presence was death,” Chrysteene Smith wrote on her Facebook page Sunday, the day Watson after suffered a fatal bullet wound to the chest at Lazy Gators lounge.
Smith praised Watson’s talent and creativity. But in a brief interview, she said she had been worried about the lifestyle he’d been leading in the rap world and had been urging him to embrace God.
As of Tuesday afternoon, authorities still had not been able to determine who fired the shot that killed Watson. Three persons of interest were questioned, but two have since been released and a third is being held on unrelated charges, Camden County Chief Deputy Sheriff Jimmy Brashear told The Star.
“But (we have) no arrests or anything on the homicide itself,” Brashear said. “We’re still watching video and gaining more information from that.”
Brashear’s boss, Sheriff Tony Helms, on Sunday asked for people at the bar around the time of the killing to furnish investigators with what he assumed were likely many cell phone videos that either captured the killing or events leading up to it.
It had been a busy night at Lazy Gators and the adjacent Shady Gators, which bills itself as the lake’s “best waterfront bar.” Co-owner Jeremy Gorham had predicted that last weekend would be the biggest ever at the lake, with people eager to escape their coronavirus cocoons.
Perhaps 20,000 customers would be ready to party, he told a a TV interviewer on Thursday, and said the venue was hiring extra staff in anticipation of large crowds.
The crowds did come, but so did tragedy around 11 Saturday night, when a gunshot rang out amid the clamor and Watson, a 27-year-old aspiring rapper and video artist, slumped to the floor.
Reached by phone Tuesday, Gorham said he wasn’t immediately prepared to comment on the shooting that marred what had otherwise been a triumphal post-COVID-19 return to normality at the resort community.
Watson’s stage name was VNZA. He grew up in Detroit, then moved to Jefferson City while in high school and most recently had been living in the Kansas City area.
Friend and former business partner Daniel Opara said in an email to The Star that Watson was “goofy, smart, talented, creative and genuine.”
The pair made music and videos together. Watson was into hip hop and the rap form known as freestyle.
Before they had a falling out two years ago, Opara helped Watson promote the clothing brand they hoped to market under the brand name FRNDS, which Opara said stood for “forever reach and never downplay success.”
Smith took to Facebook to express her grief.
“Von took me to the best dinner date I ever been on a few weeks ago and all I felt in his presence was death,” she wrote.
She told him of her concerns as they talked for hours on the Nelson lawn. Not all of it was serious. There was laughter, too, she said.
But darkness hung over their conversation.
“It was on my heart to tell him God was telling me that if he didn’t turn away from his lifestyle he didn’t have much longer here. It was so pressing I couldn’t even see a year left for him.”
Watson apparently had the same premonition.
“He told me that was crazy,” Smith wrote, “because he’s been feeling death all around him and would sometimes just want to cry and leave from where he’s at because he could feel it creeping up.”
This story was originally published June 1, 2021 at 5:10 PM.
