Aleesha Bell is shown at home with photos of her son, Charles Allen Jr., who was killed a week ago at a Youngstown nightclub. ... Staff photo / Ed Runyan

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 on 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.

LEGAL TROUBLES

Allen started to get into legal trouble not long after that.

In September 2014, he was convicted in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court of failure to comply with the orders of a police officer and was sentenced to nine months in prison, according to court records.

His legal troubles grew exponentially, in 2017, when he was charged with murder in the Aug. 29, 2017, death of Tyreese Lynch, 22. But a jury found him not guilty in 2018.

Lynch was killed on Chicago Avenue on the South Side. Prosecutors alleged that Allen committed the crime to collect money being offered on the street.

But Allen’s attorney said no one saw Allen with a gun that night and that a co-defendant who testified for the prosecution had reasons to lie.

Bell said the outcome of the trial left some people unhappy.

The result was that Allen’s car, home and family were targeted in the months that followed.

CONFLICT RAP

Bell says despite the danger, Allen rapped about the conflicts.

She said people sometimes referred to her son as Tupac because her son’s lyrics got him into trouble with other people — the way they got West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur into conflict.

Shakur was murdered in 1996, and no one was ever charged, but a 2002 Los Angeles Times story suggested that New York rapper Notorious B.I.G. put up the money and gun for the killing after he and Shakur had been feuding for more than a year.

Bell said her son rapped about his life, “what he was going through,” including the fallout from the 2018 murder trial.

“He had a target on him,” she said.

“In 2020, my son’s car got shot up 10 times,” she said. “The only time I was able to sleep was when my son was locked up in the county jail. I knew he was safe in there,” she said.

“Every time someone got shot, the first thing I would do is call my son to make sure it wasn’t him,” she said. One time his leg was “grazed” in one of the shootings but he had never been badly injured.

“I heard somebody put $50,000 on my son’s head to kill him,” she said. “I pray every day. I just put my son in God’s hands, and that’s all I could do,” she said.

HIS FATHER

His father, Charles Allen Sr., killed himself Nov. 10, 2015, because police were closing in on the house where he was staying. He ended his life instead of going to prison, Bell said.

“He figured he didn’t want to go to prison, so he took his life,” she said.

Her son had some similarities to his father, she said.

“My son had the same mentality as his father. He’d say to me ,’I’d rather be dead, Mom, on these streets than go back to prison,” she said.

In 2020, Allen Jr. was indicted on kidnapping, felonious assault and rape. A woman with whom he has children said he took her to his mother’s house, questioned her about other men, tied her hands together and assaulted her with a shovel, among other allegations.

On Feb. 18, Judge Anthony Donofrio of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court denied a motion to reduce Allen’s $250,000 bond. But Bell spent $14,000 she inherited and bailed him out later that month.

“When I bailed him out, I said, ‘My son is not going to make this trial,'” she said. “He wanted to get bailed out. He said, ‘Mom, I’m going to have to do some time. Let me get out.’ That way he can have a little bit of freedom before he has to go back in there, so that’s what I did.” His case was scheduled for trial in October.

FATAL NIGHT

She believes enemies of her son were inside the club and armed the night he was killed.

She believes she knows who killed her son, has talked to police and thinks the people responsible for her son’s death should already be in custody.

Capt. Rod Foley, who heads the detective bureau of the Youngstown Police Department, acknowledged the police department has spoken with Bell, but he would not comment on anything regarding the investigation.

Bell held one rally downtown last week regarding her son’s death and plans to hold another one soon.

She wants the suspects apprehended so they don’t lose their lives before they go to trial.

“I don’t want street justice,” she said. “I want to see them in court.”

erunyan@vindy.com