Who Was Lawrence Franks Jr.?
Franks rose to fame with his 2006 debut single “Pop, Lock & Drop It,” which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2007. But, before that, he was just another kid living on the outskirts of St. Louis, trying to make it big as a rapper.
He was born in 1987 in Kinloch, the first city incorporated in Missouri by African-Americans. Founded in 1948, the city was once home to a thriving all-Black community. But the population plummeted in the 1980s and ‘90s after the City of St. Louis began buying up land and private homes to expand its airport. By 2010, fewer than 300 residents remained.
Franks moved away from Kinloch when he was 5 years old, settling in St. Louis’ Walnut Park neighborhood. But he returned as a teenager, at a time when “there was always a lot of drugs going on and, of course, a little bit of violence,” Franks told the Riverfront Times. “...The police was real bad. County police was coming out there, chasing people and shocking them with tasers—all kind of stuff happened. Before you knew it was like a ghost town.”
Franks, the youngest of four children, had a difficult upbringing, telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch his “mama and daddy were on drugs. My brother was in and out of jail. The foster people were chasing me. It was crazy…But we made it through.”
He briefly attended two high schools, but got kicked out after a fight over a girl and later earned his GED. By the time he was 19, he’d had a child—a daughter, Lawryn—with a friend named Lady.
Franks started rapping at 14, with guidance and support from his music producer aunt Angela Richardson. At 17, he landed a $2.5 million record deal and Richardson became his manager. Franks released two albums—Notebook Paper in 2007 and Redemption in 2010—but “Pop, Lock & Drop It” was his only song to make it big.
Richardson often urged Franks to move out of Kinloch, to escape the drugs, poverty and violence that plagued the city. “I was trying to take him out of the hood,” she told the Daily Beast. “Some people can never see the light, even with money.”
Eventually, Franks took his aunt’s advice—but he didn’t go far. He moved to the suburb of St. Charles, then to downtown St. Louis, where he lived in a loft near Busch Stadium. In May 2009, he survived a drive-by shooting in downtown St. Louis, riding in a car behind an SUV that was targeted by at least two gunmen. Frank was unharmed, but three people inside the SUV—his childhood friends—were killed.
By the time he was killed in 2020, at the age of 32, Franks had largely disappeared from the public eye. He was still earning royalties from “Pop, Lock & Drop It” and had dreams of becoming a businessman.
“He enjoyed life,” Enrico Washington, his first manager, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Just happy about life…He was living the entrepreneurial spirit. He was doing it the right way.”
Why Hasn’t the Case Been Solved?
Though Franks Jr. was killed in the 2020 shooting, he appears to have been an unintended victim. Instead, friends and family think the perpetrator was targeting his nephew, White, who had recently been released from prison for charges related to a 2017 shooting.
“The hit wasn’t on Huey,” Richardson, his aunt, insisted to the Daily Beast. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Even so, with so many potential witnesses, police haven’t been able to identify the shooter or make any arrests in the case.
Ray Johnson, a retired FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Center for Crime and Justice Policy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and an adjunct professor in the university’s William S. Boyd School of Law, tells A&E Crime + Investigation the incident is a “textbook example” of a “high-risk, low-solvability” case. This type of case, he says, makes for “compelling headlines,” but “very discouraging casework” for law enforcement.
Johnson points out several specific factors that are likely working against a resolution. Drive-by shootings seldom leave behind close‑contact forensic evidence such as DNA, trace fibers or fingerprints, he says, which can make it difficult to identify a suspect or establish a connection to the crime. And when assailants remain in a vehicle and fire from the street, they control both the distance and timing of the attack, making it harder for witnesses to get a clear look at the shooter or the car.
Additionally, the potential witnesses in this case appear to have been attending a social gathering, meaning they were relaxing and enjoying themselves, not surveilling the neighborhood for potential threats, he notes. They likely felt shocked, overwhelmed or even frozen in place when the shooting took place, Johnson says, so they may not have registered the license plate number, the make and model of the vehicle or the faces of those involved.
Even if the witnesses did see or remember something useful, they may have chosen not to come forward, Johnson says, either because they distrust law enforcement or fear retaliation. The shooter may even have counted on this community code of silence to protect them.
“The justice system is much better at processing strong, well‑documented homicides with clear suspects than it is at untangling brief, chaotic scenes with minimal evidence where everyone is scared to talk,” he says.
However, Johnson notes that unsolved does not mean hopeless. One person deciding, even years later, that they’re ready to tell the full truth can often change the trajectory of a cold case like this one, he says. A break in the case could also come from an unrelated investigation, particularly if a recovered firearm is later linked through ballistics testing to the weapon used to kill Franks. Similarly, he notes, group‑crime intelligence can sometimes later connect dots that weren’t obvious at the time of the incident.
Cases like this one may be difficult to solve. But, he says, “They are not impossible.”
