Gunmen claim the life of a popular spoken word artist in North Miami on Memorial Day weekend.
From the Miami Herald:
Miami’s budding world of poetry and spoken-word performance lost a defining voice early Sunday after gunmen shot and killed local poet Will “Da Real One’’ Bell outside the North Miami cafe where he had plied his trade for years and given a venue to countless other wordsmiths.
Bell, 47, whose performances have been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, had just closed his business, the Literary Cafe and Poetry Lounge on 933 NE 125th Street, at about 12:40 a.m. and was walking to his car nearby when another car occupied by at least two men pulled up beside him, said Lt. Neal Cuevas of the North Miami Police Department.
A gunman leapt out from the passenger seat and fired multiple times at Bell, who died on the scene, Cuevas said. The men then fled in the car, but did not take any of Bell’s possessions, which included cash and jewelry.
“We don’t have a motive right now,’’ Cuevas said.
Several witnesses, who had been inside The Literary Cafe earlier that night, offered police differing descriptions of the suspects’ car color as light and dark, with a spoiler on the rear.
Bell will be missed in South Florida’s poetry and spoken-word performance scene, where he loomed as a local laureate, having achieved national recognition with performances on Def Poetry Jam and on albums by artists such as Miami’s Pit Bull, and hosting open-mic nights at his Literary Cafe and other venues.
The 6-foot-5 Bell had a troubled history:
Bell grew up in the Edison Court Projects on Northwest Third Avenue and 62nd Street, where his single mother moved the family shortly after Bell’s father left them.
In 1989, Bell was arrested for armed cocaine trafficking in his neighborhood. He was convicted, and sentenced to 14 months in prison.
Behind bars, he began writing love letters to an imaginary woman waiting for him “on the outside.’’
After showing his letters to a fellow prisoner, who encouraged his prose, Bell and the prisoner began a business ghost writing loves letters for other inmates in exchange for commissary items.
When he left prison in 1990, Bell left poetry behind. It took another decade before the muse struck Bell once again at an open mic poetry reading.
After signing up in 2001 for Lip, Tongue & Ear, a weekly, open-mic poetry competition for poets, Bell was hooked.
He won successive contests, eventually earning the title of Lip Tongue & Ear’s Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade in April 2003, a designation he held for a year.
It didn’t take long for Bell to launch a career in poetry with CDs, and performance and promotion fees. His big break came in 2004, when he performed on Def Poetry Jam.
Bell opened the Literary Cafe in summer 2003, with a vision of giving poets a place to perform their art.
Read the rest of the Herald story here.
The Will Da Real One Facebook tribute page can be found here.
North Miami is a middle class neighborhood north of the City of Miami. It is home to Florida International University, and is considered an up-and-coming city in Miami-Dade County. The street where the shooting occurred is not considered a high crime area, and is home to the Museum of Contemporary Art, a Starbucks, and several high end businesses. To say a drive by shooting would be unusual on this block would not be an understatement.
