ATLANTA — A father believes his son’s attempts to leave the rap business may have led to someone shooting and killing him. Now, nearly one year later, police continue their search for the gunman.
“I’m still like in the Twilight Zone,” McKinley Hodges told Channel 2’s Tom Jones for Channel 2 Action News at 5:00 p.m.
Hodges says he was in a fragile state after someone shot and killed his only son.
“I come from being homicidal, suicidal and all this other stuff,” he said.
He says every day is still a struggle, and thinks it will be this way until the person who killed 38-year-old McKinley Hodges Jr. is captured.
“All I want to know is if anybody got the guts of the heart to please come forward,” the father said.
It was June 16 around 4a.m. last year when Atlanta police say the younger Hodges was shot in a garage at a home on New Hope Road in Southwest Atlanta. He stumbled out and died in the driveway.
The elder Hodges says his faith has helped him deal with his loss. He says he’s even gotten to the point where he is not as mad at his son’s killer.
“I can forgive the person did it,” he said.
Police say at least four or five people were in the garage at the time of the shooting. Yet the phone call to 911 came from his Hodge’s uncle, who lives nearby. Police want the witnesses to come forward.
Hodges hoped his son would follow in his footsteps and become a certified electrician. He was on track to do that but then Hodges says his son decided to become a mechanic.
That soon changed, and his son was excited about becoming a rapper.
“Dad, I got a chance to make a lot of money,” Hodges recalled his son telling him.
Hodges says his son lived at the home with other rappers but grew tired of the rap lifestyle and wanted out. He said his son had a new girlfriend and a new job and wanted a different life.
Hodges says his son said he was going to move out.
“They’re getting ready to go on tour. I’m not going,” he recalled his son saying.
The father says his son’s girlfriend told him his son kept getting urgent calls to come home the night he died.
“He got home and he got killed,” he said.
Now police are working to find his killer. Finding the gunman won’t ease the father’s pain.
“But I will have a little more peace just to know, you know, just to know,” McKinley Hodges Sr. said.
Police would only say the case is active and still under investigation.
McKinley wants the public to know there is a reward up to $5,000 for information leading to his son’s killer.
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