[dropcap size=big]S[/dropcap]anyika Shakur, the infamous former Eight Tray Gangster Crip who was once known as “Monster” Kody Scott, was reportedly found dead on June 6 at the age of 57 in a tent along the San Luis Rey River Trail in Oceanside, CA.
Shakur first blasted into national consciousness both on the cover and in the pages of Leon Bing’s seminal 1992 book on L.A. gangs, Do or Die. The next year, Scott published his own best-selling memoir, Monster: Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member, which he penned by hand, mostly while in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay on a conviction for assault with a firearm.
Appearing on the cover shirtless, jacked-as-all-fuck, inked torso scarred from the six shots that tried to snuff him at 16, and gripping a MAC-10 between both palms behind his pair of pitch-black Locs, Scott’s bold, shocking bio laid bare a crazy life. The book covered a childhood steeped in abuse and neglect, the era of 70s and 80s L.A. gangbanging, his predilection for homicide and self-medication, and perpetual prison stints at a time when many outside the world of gang warfare struggled to understand L.A.’s uprising and exploding early 90s violence. The book would turn him into a star of the international literary world.
Scott was jumped into Eight Tray, a newly spun-off set of the foundational West Side Crips, in 1975 as a sixth grader navigating the Harvard Park neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. The young Monster, a neglected latchkey kid habitually left to fend for himself in the rough neighborhood, was a constant presence at the house of his mentor and neighbor, Crips founder Stanley “Tookie” Williams. Scott himself was a founder of the Northside Eight Tray Gangster Crips set.
Possessed by an impassioned hatred for his enemies, primarily Eight Tray’s biggest rivals, the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, the killing started immediately, only sporadically interrupted by Scott’s recurring stays in YA and prison.