YOUNGSTOWN — Aleesha Bell says her son, Charles Allen Jr., had accepted that he probably would be murdered.

Allen, 27, was shot to death early April 3 at the Utopia Video Nightclub, where he had performed rap music earlier that evening.

Bell said the lyrics he rapped and the conflicts with other area men that followed a 2018 murder trial are no doubt the reasons he was killed.

Allen “started loving music when he was 16,” she said.

He and some friends formed the group New Era, which had a big opportunity in 2010, performing during a Soulja Boy concert at the Covelli Centre Dec. 3, 2010, when Allen was 17.

“A lot of record companies wanted my son,” she said. “My son was a celebrity.”

But Bell thinks that success breeded jealousy.

“A lot of people didn’t like my son. They came to my house and tried to kill my son,” she said.

She believes the 2012 killing of Trevon Kimbrough, one of the members of the group, happened because someone wanted to kill Allen, she said.

“They couldn’t get to my son, so they killed his boy,” she said. No one was ever charged in Kimbrough’s death, she said.

Read more from Bell and what Youngstown police are saying in Sunday’s Vindicator.