6. His father is serving a life sentence in prison for murder, and his mother didn’t want “the streets swallowing him up.”
Qawmane Wilson’s father has been out of his life for the past 20 years, thanks to a murder conviction that landed him a life prison sentence at Statesville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois.
Wilson’s father, Jeffrey Todd Wilson, a reputed West Side gang leader, was arrested in 1993 on accusations that he set fire to an apartment building in 1990 that killed two low-level crackhouse workers after the dealer who ran the drug den refused to pay him a street tax of $500 to $1,000 per month.
Wilson’s cousin Zion Banks said his mother wanted to make sure that he would never have to use “gangster tactics” to get what he wanted.
She didn’t want “the streets swallowing him up,” she said. “[Yolanda] was a single parent who took so many steps to make sure he was OK,” Banks said. “He grew up loved.”
