Family deals with loss of amateur rapper

By PATRICIA MEADE
VINDICATOR CRIME REPORTER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Michael J. Lett kissed the mother of his 4-year-old son goodbye and left their housewarming party to go rapping at a South Side bar.
"He said, 'I love you Boo-Boo.' That's the last time I saw him alive," Tara Moore said, wiping tears from her eyes. "At the hospital, they wouldn't let anyone see him."
Lett, 20, of Hillman Street, was pronounced dead at 4:43 a.m. Saturday at St. Elizabeth Health Center. About two hours earlier, he'd been shot several times near the rear parking lot of the Classique Lounge on South Avenue and fell to the sidewalk.
"My baby knows his daddy isn't coming back," Moore said as her son peeked from behind her back. "He's shy," the 18-year-old mother said of Michael J. Lett Jr., the little boy everyone calls Poppy.
Moore said she met Lett when she was 12. He was silly and funny, someone all the kids loved and called Uncle Mike.
Brother was witness
The image of how Lett died keeps playing in the mind of his older brother, a witness to the gunfire.
"I stopped to talk to somebody and then saw a dude get out of a car and run over and shoot. He had a hood on. It was dark. We'd been drinking," said Tadarrel Lett, 30. "I just see it over and over again."
Tadarrel Lett, shot about 10 years ago, uses a wheelchair. He chain-smoked Monday at his West Side apartment as he talked about his brother, but it didn't have the desired effect of calming his nerves.
He smiled, though, as he remembered cutting grass, shoveling snow and raking leaves to earn money to buy his little brother name brand tennis shoes and video games.
"I made sure he had what he wanted," he said.
He then vividly recalled bending over his wounded brother and the promise not kept. "He said 'Big B, I'll be all right.'"
Big B was short for Big Brother.
Friday night, the brothers had gone first to Patsy's, another South Avenue bar, where Michael Lett, an unemployed amateur rapper trying to break into the music business, was rapping at the microphone. He wrote his own rap songs. "I got a whole book," the grieving older brother said.
Motive unknown
Going to the Classique wasn't Tadarrel Lett's idea. In fact, he was against it but went along. He doesn't know the motive for the shooting, only that someone said his brother had argued with a woman in the bar.
Tadarrel Lett said he saw no argument, no commotion.
"I wish I could give my life to bring him back," Lett said, absently rubbing his hands on the wheels of his chair. "He was 20 years old, just a boy. He didn't have a beef with anybody."
Lett said he won't rest until the person responsible is caught and convicted.
Detective Sgt. Gerry Maietta, lead investigator on the case, could not be reached. As of this morning, no arrests had been made.
Aside from a young son, Michael Lett's family includes three brothers, three sisters and a 3-year-old daughter.
An older sister, LaToya Lett, 27, described her brother as a funny, sweet likable person who once loved school and was named after Michael Jackson. "No one could not like him," she said.
Court records show that Lett was on probation for a loud music violation and had been given treatment in lieu of conviction on a drug offense.
meade@vindy.com