Her son was the first YBC member to be killed. She resents the group for using his death as an excuse to hurt others
When Joshua Munson was killed in 2019, everything changed — for his family, and his friends in YBC.
Natasha Laboy recalls seeing her son Joshua Munson running in and out of the house in T-shirts that said “YBC.” She remembers pulling the shirts out of the wash and asking him the meaning of the three red letters emblazoned across the chest.
YBC, he said, was his friends’ new music group.
Nearly six years later, the exchange haunts her.
Because Munson’s connections to the Young Bag Chasers — which started as a group of friends making music, then evolved into a violent gang — were the reason police say he was shot and killed in May 2019.
After someone in the group beat up another kid from West Philly over a girl, a young man from the other side went to 42nd Street and Wyalusing Avenue looking for revenge, police said. The gunman encountered Munson, and shot him in the head and back.
“They let him live for 18 years and 36 days,” Laboy said in an interview inside her West Philadelphia home.
Munson was hospitalized for two days before doctors determined that he was brain-dead and would not survive. Laboy made the heart-wrenching decision to donate his organs — including his heart, lungs, and kidneys — in hopes that saving others’ lives would bring her some comfort.
It has brought little solace, she said. Her grief is constant, and her three sons are forever broken without their brother.
Joshua David Munson was born on April 25, 2001. He was raised in the West Philadelphia area, playing basketball for Christy Recreation Center near 56th and Christian Streets in Cobbs Creek, before his family moved near 42nd and Leidy Streets.
Munson, the second oldest of four boys, and his brothers were inseparable, piling onto their couch and into their mother’s bed as children for movie nights. He had a knack for recalling quotes from the films they watched.
Almost everywhere his family went, Laboy said, her son encountered someone he knew. It could be annoying at times how many friends he had, how he got roped into long conversations during short trips out of the house, she said with a chuckle.
She misses it every day now.
Beyond shattering his family, Munson’s death devastated his friends in YBC. His killing, YBC members said in interviews and comments shared online, changed their focus from dreams of getting rich off their music to exacting revenge. Their songs became darker and more confrontational, and they started dissing their enemies in their lyrics.
Laboy remembered going to a candlelight vigil for her son in the days after his death and encountering his friend Abdul Vicks. Vicks, by now more widely known as the rapper “YBC Dul,” was distraught, pacing in the street. He wouldn’t let Laboy hug him, she said, because he had a gun in his waistband.
Laboy said her family pleaded with Vicks and others in YBC not to retaliate. More violence would not bring her son back, she said, and she didn’t want another mother to hurt the way she did.
But they didn’t listen, she said. She doesn’t know the name of the young man who shot her son, but people in the neighborhood have told her he has since been killed. (Philadelphia police said they never identified a suspect in Munson’s shooting death, so they could not confirm whether that was true.)
Laboy said she wept when she heard that her son’s killer was dead. As a Christian, she said, she envisioned a day when she might meet him and forgive him for what he did.
“I cried bitterly when I found out,” she said. “He is also a child with a mother … and he didn’t have the chance to repent and change.”
She said she resents Vicks and other members of YBC for using her son’s death as justification for more violence.
“I feel like he used my son’s death to propel his reputation and hurt others,” she said of Vicks.
But she tries not to think about YBC anymore. She focuses instead on her favorite memories, remembering her four boys together, the brotherly banter, the infectious giggles.
“I find myself missing how he laughed,” she said. “I can’t sometimes remember his laughter, and he loved to laugh.”