Father wants answers after rap artist 88Dub is fatally shot by Fort Worth police
A Fort Worth father says he wants justice after his son, 25-year-old local rap artist Emmitt Elijah Mayo, was fatally shot by police early Saturday in the 4200 block of Wiman Drive.
Police received multiple 911 calls about shots fired in the area where a party was being held in the east Fort Worth neighborhood. According to police, Elijah Mayo pointed a gun at responding officers. But his father, Emmitt Mayo, and friend Billy Kirven, who witnessed the shooting, are disputing what police said.
The Fort Worth Police Department has not yet released body-camera video from the shooting.
‘A phone call that I’ve been dreading’
Emmitt Mayo told the Star-Telegram that his son liked to rap and liked being in the limelight. He went by the stage name 88Dub, and on Saturday night went to the east Fort Worth neighborhood to perform at a house party.
Elijah liked to play with his brothers and sisters, his father said, and as a young adult he still “liked to have water gun fights and balloon fights and wrestle them down. He was an awesome brother to them.”
“Anybody that ever met my son said that he was an awesome person. He was different; he was genuine,” Emmitt Mayo said. Last month Elijah turned 25 and his father remembered the family singing him happy birthday.
On the night of the shooting, Emmitt Mayo said, he could feel in his stomach that something was off, “and just right about then I got a phone call that I’ve been dreading hearing my whole life.”
“They just said he was shot, so I took off over there as fast as I could, but I knew with my soul that he was gone,” the dad said.
Friend witnessed shooting
Elijah went to the neighborhood to perform at a house party where he was supposed to be paid, but a shooting had already erupted before he arrived about midnight, said his friend Billy Kirven, who was with him. Elijah tried to track down the people who booked him in order to get his payment, and that’s when a dispute broke out and more shots were fired, Kirven said. He said Elijah pulled out his handgun to defend himself.
They ran to their car, and about 10 seconds later some people, who they did not know or see in the dark, started shooting, Kirven said.
“We never heard (them saying) Fort Worth Police Department. I heard them tell him, ‘Put the gun down,’ but by that time he was already shot, and his body locked up on him,” Kirven said. “I just know for sure he (Elijah) didn’t up a gun at the people that came beside us, which was the police officers.”
Kirven, who has known Elijah for more than a decade, said, “Every time I try to close my eyes, all I see is my bro and I couldn’t help. That’s the worst part.” The friend said he is traumatized and hasn’t had “a good day to sleep since the situation happened.”
Kirven remembered Elijah as a “life of the party type person.”
“He wanted to be a signed artist, like he wanted to really switch his lane up and get millions for his music. He didn’t want to be stuck in Fort Worth,” Kirven said.
“I wish they could have at least used pepper spray or some other methods instead of just shooting,” Kirven said. “Then they killed someone else in the area later on.”
As officers were working at the scene about four hours after Elijah Mayo was killed, a sport utility vehicle drove by multiple times at a high rate of speed, according to police. Chief Eddie Garcia said the driver appeared to be trying to hit officers standing near their vehicles.
Officers chased the SUV for about 15 minutes and eventually stopped it by hitting it with a police vehicle, causing it to spin in the northbound lanes of Loop 820 near the East Lancaster Avenue exit, police have said.
The driver did not comply with officers’ orders and grabbed an officer’s drawn handgun, Garcia said. Multiple officers opened fire, killing the man, who was identified by the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office as 29-year-old Jorge Contreras.
“Why they (police officers) gotta kill everybody, make people be scared to leave the house and go outside, enjoy their life?” Kirven said.
Emmitt Mayo said they live in an area “where you defend for your life every day … people have to carry guns, because that’s how it is in the neighborhood.”
Father wants answers
“They shot him in the head and in the chest — they went straight for the kill on him. He wasn’t even aiming a pistol at them,” said Emmitt Mayo, who talked to witnesses after his son died. “He wasn’t no threat to them. He was just trying to get back to his car safely, because he just had a shootout previously with some other people.”
“I’m trying to get everybody that’ll listen involved, because there is nothing that I can do about it,” the father said.
Emmitt Mayo said he wants to “fight the system legally — right now I fear for my life, my younger son fears for his life, because there’s no justice, and there never will be.”
“At least I got to see him for the last time and tell him I love him, and he left,” the father said. “There was never a time that we’ve ever been together that we did not say we love each other.”
Fort Worth police said their Major Case Unit is investigating both fatal shootings and more information is expected to be released at a later news conference. The department generally releases bodycam video within about a week of a fatal shooting involving officers.
Neighbors react to shooting, parties
A woman who lives on Wiman Drive who did not want to be named said that house parties that overflow into the street have generally gone unchecked by authorities before.
“These parties have been going on for a long time,” the woman said. “They come and they run through the yards, they pee on the side of people’s houses, they leave trash in our yard all the time.”
Video shared with the Star-Telegram from the night of the shooting shows several people hiding behind cars in front of a home on the street. “He got hit,” a young woman hiding behind the cars says in the video.
The resident said that she has seen kids run through her yard during the parties, and that although police have been called in the past, she did not feel like they did enough.
“The cops do know that the parties are going on,” the woman said. “They just don’t do anything about it, and that’s their fault that it got that far. If they had put a stop to it, maybe these kinds of things would not be happening.”
On Monday, police officers were taking photos of the scene as a police dog sniffed the front yard of the home where Elijah Mayo died. An officer on scene would not say what the dog was trained to do.
“Our office has been working with PD to address gunfire in that area,” said Fort Worth District 11 City Council member Jeanette Martinez. “We have not received complaints about specific properties.”
Clifton Booker said he has lived on Wiman Drive for over 20 years, and the parties only became an issue recently, with teenagers blocking his driveway and throwing trash in his yard.
“It didn’t used to be like that, but these teenagers, they don’t care, they don’t care about nothing or nobody, and then when you confront them, they get mad and want to fight,” Booker said. “We’re tired of it.”
Staff writers Emily Holshouser and Harrison Mantas contributed to this report.
This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 12:12 PM.