Zachary “ZackTV” Stoner, a 30-year-old Black male, was driving through Chicago's South Loop just after closing time on May 30, 2018, when gunfire from another car tore through his Jeep near the 700 block of South Clark Street. He had spent part of the night at the Refuge nightclub on Clark, where a rap show packed the rooms, and then headed out into Printer's Row, a corridor thick with security cameras and late-night foot traffic.
Around 1:30 a.m., shots shattered the windshield and struck him in the head and neck; his Jeep jumped the curb and crumpled against a light pole. Bystanders saw people scramble into a getaway car as the scene erupted, and Stoner was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead before dawn.
In the hours before the ambush, Stoner—known widely for ground-level reporting on Chicago's rap and neighborhood scenes—had been recorded mixing with concertgoers at Refuge. His killing unsettled the community of “gangland” documentarians he helped pioneer, a world he sometimes called “hood CNN,” and it drew urgent questions about whether the attack was a targeted strike tied to simmering street feuds. In the months that followed, police and the medical examiner compiled a detailed record while detectives pulled surveillance video, canvassed witnesses, and traced movements around the club and the shooting block.
According to records later obtained by the Associated Press, investigators eventually arrested five suspected members of the South Side “Perry Avenue” gang, ages 19 to 22, on probable cause of first-degree murder. Detectives cited video evidence, eyewitness accounts, cellphone location data, and ballistics—including a bullet recovered from Stoner's body—as the backbone of their case. But in 2019 the Cook County State's Attorney's Office declined to bring charges, citing inconsistent witnesses and the possibility that the shooting involved “mutual combatants,” and the suspects were released. Subsequent reporting noted that at least two of those suspects were later killed in unrelated violence, and authorities have never publicly announced a prosecution in Stoner's homicide.
