He Posted His Birthday Plans. A Rival Gang Was Reading Them.

He posted his birthday plans online. A rival gang was reading them.

At about four o’clock in the morning on June 23, 2024, a 26-year-old man walked out of a Tampa hotel with three friends and got into a car. He never drove out of the parking lot. His name was Charles Andrew Jones II. To hundreds of thousands of listeners, he was the rapper Julio Foolio. He had turned 26 two days earlier, and he had spent the weekend posting publicly about where he would be celebrating.

Two hundred miles north, in Jacksonville, people who had been at war with his associates for more than a decade were reading those posts. Five of them – four men and one woman – drove down to Tampa in the early hours of that morning and waited outside the Home2 Suites hotel. When Jones and his friends came out, three men approached the car with a pistol and two rifles and opened fire. Jones was killed. Three other people were injured.

What followed was not a forensic mystery. It was a documentation problem – for the people who did it. Detectives pulled cell-site records that mapped four phones travelling from Jacksonville to Tampa and back on the night of the shooting. They pulled surveillance video of the approach and the escape. They pulled messages. They recovered shell casings at the scene and matched the ammunition found in one suspect’s car to casings from two earlier incidents, including a 2023 attempt on Jones’s life that he survived.

This video covers the Jacksonville drill scene and the 6-Block / ATK / 1200 feud that prosecutors argued was the motive; the October 2023 shooting Jones survived; the birthday weekend and how his own posts were used to track him; the ambush itself and the three people wounded alongside him; how cell-site evidence actually works and what it can and cannot prove; the July 2024 arrests and the six-month hunt for the final suspect; Alicia Andrews’s separate trial, her manslaughter verdict and the judicial-bias dispute that delayed her sentencing by seven months; the four-defendant trial in April and May 2026; how Florida’s two-phase capital sentencing works and why the verdict came in May but the sentence did not arrive until June; the victim-impact testimony from Jones’s mother; and the four life sentences handed down on June 22, 2026.

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Sources and credits

CASE FACTS
- Tampa Bay Times, "Court records detail gang feud, ambush murder of rapper
  Julio Foolio" (Aug 7, 2024) - the 6-Block / ATK / 1200 feud, the ambush
  sequence, the roles of the five defendants.
- First Coast News, "Foolio's murder: What investigators say connected the
  suspected rival gang members to rapper's slaying" (Aug 7, 2024) - the
  ballistics link between the casings at the scene, the 2023 attempt on
  Jones's life and a 2022 homicide.
- City of Tampa press release, "Three Arrested, Two Wanted, in Connection with
  Murder of Charles Jones aka 'Julio Foolio'" (July 29, 2024) - the arrests,
  the defendants' dates of birth and gang affiliations, and the announcement
  by Tampa Police Chief Lee Bercaw, Jacksonville Sheriff T. K. Waters and
  Hillsborough County State Attorney Suzy Lopez.
- Florida Times-Union, "Last one down: Jacksonville police arrest final
  suspect in rapper Julio Foolio's gang hit" (Jan 7, 2025) - Davion Murphy's
  arrest.
- First Coast News trial coverage, days 2, 5 and 6 (Apr 23, 29 and 30, 2026) -
  survivor and witness testimony, the medical examiner's testimony, the gang
  detective's testimony about post-shooting social media activity, and the
  searches of two defendants' homes and vehicles.
- Tampa Bay Times, "Tampa jury finds 4 men guilty in ambush killing of rapper
  Julio Foolio" (May 8, 2026) - the verdict after roughly eight hours of
  deliberation.
- Tampa Bay Times, "Convicted in Julio Foolio's murder, defendant tells jury
  he's sorry" (May 12, 2026) - the penalty phase, the state's aggravating
  arguments, the victim-impact testimony from Jones's mother, and Sean
  Gathright's testimony.
- Florida Times-Union, "Jacksonville rapper Julio Foolio's killers are spared
  the death penalty" (May 15, 2026) - the jury's life recommendation.
- Tampa Bay Times, "Tampa judge issues 4 life sentences for murder of rapper
  Julio Foolio" (June 22, 2026) - the sentences imposed by Judge Michelle
  Sisco, including the concurrent terms.
- Tampa Bay Times / News4Jax (Oct 2025 - May 2026) - Alicia Andrews's trial,
  manslaughter verdict, the judicial-bias dispute and her 15-year sentence.

IMAGES AND FOOTAGE
- Charles Andrew Jones II: identification photograph widely republished across
  news coverage of this case (used for the opening slide, the closing slide,
  the Facebook teaser card and the YouTube thumbnail).
- Booking photographs of Isaiah Chance, Sean Gathright, Davion Murphy and
  Rashad Murphy, released by the arresting agencies following their 2024-25
  arrests; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Still frames from body-camera video publicly released by the Jacksonville
  Sheriff's Office documenting the July 27, 2024 arrests in this case; public
  domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Jacksonville night skyline - CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Tampa at night - CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Night-time long exposure of traffic - CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
  (illustrative, not the scene).
- Studio condenser microphone - CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
  (illustrative).
- Cellular tower - CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (illustrative).
- CCTV control room monitor wall - CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
  (illustrative, not this case's footage).
- Generic illustrative stock reused from earlier videos in this series
  (residential street, smartphone, forensic examination, case files,
  courtroom, scales, gavel, prison cell block). None of these depict this
  case; each is credited as illustrative on-screen.
- No unlicensed news-broadcast footage was used anywhere in this video.

AFFILIATE LINKS
- Amazon Associates tag AMAZON_ASSOC_TAG = truecrimecases-20, applied
  2026-09-17.
- One link, and it is a tagged SEARCH URL, not a verified-ASIN product link.
  Three candidate ASINs surfaced for this case/region (B0HG7RLC8B,
  B0HG82WGS1, B0HCQVTYLH - the "True Crime Florida" series) and all three were
  run through scripts/verify_book.py on 2026-09-17 and REJECTED: no rating
  count at all on the first two, and zero ratings on the third. They carry the
  signature of rapid-turnaround cash-in titles, so none of them was linked.
  Per the skill's affiliate ladder this case falls to rung 3: an honest,
  case-scoped tagged search URL, worded plainly in the description.
- No verified-ASIN product links appear in this package.

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