Chicago drill rapper BloodHound Q50 was laid to rest Friday in a private service attended by close family and friends in Merrillville, Indiana, where Northwest Indiana police maintained a visible presence throughout the day.
Photos circulating online and shared by the podcast account No Jumper showed moments from the memorial. The service came roughly twelve days after the killing that has cast the late rapper’s short career in retrospect, and landed as Chicago police continue to seek tips from the public.
Q50, whose full name was Mikquale T. Cooper, was 22. He was born August 6, 2004, and raised in Chicago with part of his childhood spent in Northwest Indiana, according to local reporting in the Northwest Indiana Times and AllHipHop. His mother is Machetta Dudley.
Cooper was killed in a coordinated ambush shortly before 4 a.m. on September 13. He sat in the driver’s seat of a white Tesla at the BP gas station at 4248 South Wentworth Avenue in Chicago’s Fuller Park neighborhood. According to a preliminary Chicago Police Department report, two vehicles pulled alongside his car, and gunmen from both opened fire, discharging more than 50 rounds. Cooper was struck multiple times in the chest, shoulder, and other areas. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Surveillance footage reviewed by officers showed assailants, several dressed in black and at least one in a green hoodie, fleeing south onto the Dan Ryan Expressway in a black sedan and a silver Honda Accord. A gun was recovered from Cooper at the scene, according to a law enforcement source. No arrests had been announced as of late September, and Chicago police detectives from Area One continued to investigate. No motive has been made public.
Hypefresh has tracked the case since the shooting itself, including an earlier report on the suspect who appeared to confess to the killing on a livestream, and a broader Hypefresh cluster on the Chicago drill scene’s recent run of gun violence, which has now claimed another young artist.
Cooper rose quickly in Chicago’s drill scene after starting to rap in 2023. Early tracks including “Big 3” and “Coffin” drew attention. He was associated with the BloodHound collective and often linked to his cousin, Bloodhound Lil Jeff, who was killed in 2024. Cooper released the project “Long Live My Brudda He Prolly Kilt Yo Brudda” and followed it with “Get Back or Die Trying” on his 22nd birthday in August 2026. He had appeared on stages including Rolling Loud and collaborated with a roster of artists at the Chicago drill scene’s national edge.
In interviews before his death, Cooper told DJ Akademiks he was not chasing death but was not running from it either, and said he knew what he had signed up for. His mother, Machetta Dudley, publicly addressed online mockery after the shooting, defending her son and warning critics while rejecting calls for a GoFundMe. Cooper had earlier surfaced in a St. Louis shooting incident covered separately by Hypefresh and in a separate reporting arc around an alleged $60,000 theft that preceded the STL shooting, both of which shaped the public narrative around him in his final months.
The private funeral marked the end of a short but rapidly rising career cut short by the same gun violence that has claimed many young artists in Chicago’s drill community. Chicago police continue to seek information on the September 13 shooting.
