Anthony “Young Yoppa” Kostrzewa, a 24-year-old white man from Aurora, was known to friends and family as A.J., a smiling presence who poured his energy into music and into the tight circles of people he trusted. On August 1, 2014, that circle widened for an afternoon to include a house on Aurora's near east side, in the 200 block of Schiller Street, where he stood in the front yard with two other men on a warm summer day.
The quiet moment in the yard shattered when a dark gray pickup truck, carrying at least three people, rolled to a stop outside the home. Two men, described later by witnesses only as Hispanic and dressed in dark clothing, stepped out and walked toward the group. As the tension spiked, the two men standing with Anthony bolted for the safety of the house, diving through the doorway while he turned and ran toward the backyard. The truck stayed in the street as the armed men gave chase, following him around the side of the house and into the narrow space behind it. There, gunfire cracked across the yard. When the shooting stopped, the fleeing men jumped back into the pickup, which sped south on Schiller and then east on Fenton, leaving Anthony collapsed in the grass, mortally wounded by at least one shot.
Police and paramedics rushed to the scene after a 2:35 p.m. call for help, but there was nothing more that could be done; he was pronounced dead there in the backyard, the house suddenly transformed from a neighborhood hangout into a crime scene marked off by tape. Detectives quickly concluded that the killing was not random. The same house had been sprayed with bullets in a drive-by shooting just a day earlier, in the pre-dawn hours, an attack that left no one injured but scarred the siding and windows and caused an estimated couple of hundred dollars in damage. There had been no clear suspect description from that earlier incident either, just the eerie knowledge that someone had already marked the property before returning in daylight to take a life.
In the days that followed, investigators publicly said they believed gang motivation might have played a role, tying together the back-to-back shootings and Anthony's own recent history with the justice system. One detailed summary of the case notes that he had been released from jail only weeks earlier, in July, after serving a short sentence on a probation violation, and that his background and associations may have made him a target in a simmering gang conflict. Whatever the underlying feud, the picture painted by police was of a deliberate ambush: a car full of men who knew where to find him, pulling up in broad daylight, singling him out from the three people in the yard, and chasing him down when he ran.
Alongside the official language of press releases and case summaries, another portrait of Anthony emerged in the places where people who loved him tried to keep his voice alive. Under the name Young Yoppa, he had recorded a string of raw, street-level tracks that circulated online, later gathered into posthumous digital albums with titles like “Y” and “Back At It Again,” released by an independent label based in Naperville. Those compilations, drawn from his old YouTube uploads, sit next to simple memorial notes—“R.I.P. Young Yoppa”—and comments from friends and family lighting virtual candles and addressing him directly, a digital vigil that never quite ends. At his grave in West Batavia Cemetery in Kane County, Illinois, records mark the bare facts of his life—born in August 1989, buried after his murder in 2014—while online tributes fill in the rest with stories, nicknames, and grief.
From the beginning, Aurora police appealed to the public for help, urging anyone who had seen the dark gray pickup or knew the men in dark clothing to come forward, and Crime Stoppers offered a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to an arrest. The suspects remained officially unnamed, known only through that brief description and the route their vehicle took as it fled the neighborhood. Case summaries and memorial sites that track homicides still present Anthony's killing as an open investigation, repeating the details of the truck, the chase into the backyard, and the belief that gang tensions were behind it, but they do not report any arrest, indictment, or publicly identified suspect since the day he died.
