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A close friend of mine, Dylan Palumbo (who went by the persona “Ill Dyl” as a very skilled comedy-focused rapper in Toronto) was brutally and suddenly murdered this past week as part of a home invasion style robbery at his apartment in North York. As the focus of the incident appears to have been to steal money and drugs that were on site, some media reports have exaggerated his place as a “drug den” and stereotyped him as a “drug dealing rapper” who died in what many outside readers would assume is a natural cycle of gang violence. Dylan was not a big time dealer, he was not a hard drug dealer, and he was not part of a gang. None of us can imagine anyone who knew him personally ever contemplating doing something like this to him.

More information about the attack and the suspects is available elsewhere, with this story in the Toronto Star being the most fair description of his actual personality and life.

In preparation for being interviewed for that Star article, I wrote out a bunch of my thoughts so I could collect myself as much as possible beforehand. Of course, I always run too long when I’m writing things, and I know full well that in the world of journalism, everything is cut short five times over before it can go to print – I wish more things could have been printed about Dylan, but I know I’d never be satisfied even if the whole paper had been about him, and am definitely happy with what they ran.

(I should also say specifically: much thanks to a friend-of-a-friend reporter at the Star for finding me and reaching out to me, as well as to my and Dylan’s friend Mike for separately finding and contacting another Star staffer at the same time.)

Here are my thoughts on Dylan, how he has been portrayed and how I knew him.

I’ve known Dylan since going to high school together in the Bathurst/Sheppard area and have maintained a large but tight-knit group of mutual friends since.

He was still a typical “class clown” type, everything worth thinking about in life was worth joking about to him. He had a definitive crass sense of humour which he loved the shock value of, but behind it he was also a deeply thoughtful and very naturally wise person who would consistently offer some of the best advice around – whether it was what you wanted to hear or not about a situation.

His place has been described more than once as a “drug den”, and that description is not fair. I work for a city youth harm reduction project and we have lots of contact with youth who use substances in this city and we get plenty of knowledge of how drug dealers are operating, and a lot of it is this Hollywood stereotype that he’s being painted as. It simply does not fit when you’re talking about Dylan.

Yes, as has already been publicized, he had some drugs available for when he happened to be available to hook people up with them. But his primary source of income came from working as a landscaping and construction foreman, and he worked harder than anyone I know. He often had to put off things he wanted to be doing (like working on music) for weeks or months because he would be working full time and be resting up from exhausting himself the rest of the time. He got me a job at one point when he knew I was struggling, and I had to quit very early on because even though I’ve had plenty of labour-intensive jobs, I simply couldn’t wake up or move after a little bit of what he considered light work.

He was also the biggest comic book nerd I’ve ever met, and I regularly attend anime and comic conventions. The media has reported on the drugs available at his apartment, something that hasn’t been talked about is that the collection of action figures and comic books almost certainly eclipsed the value of any drugs or drug money he had on hand. And unlike a profit-driven person, all the action figures were removed from their original packaging and used to decorate every spare inch of his bedroom, simply because he loved them and was a dork like that.

Another example of his personality – last year, his old roommate and him adopted a pet pig that was supposed to be a “mini pig” that would stay small and be suitable as a household pet. That adorable little pig, named Basket, had mostly free run of his place and lived like a squealing pet puppy. Does that sound like something typical of a gangster’s drug den? No, but it was typical of a positive, fun and silly home environment like the one Dylan was trying to maintain for himself and his friends.

Eventually, he realized that the pig was growing too large and couldn’t keep living there. Did he re-sell Basket (who had not been cheap to adopt) for profit? Did he go dump Basket heartlessly in a ravine? No, we drove hours out of the city so he could turn Basket over, for free, to a charity animal sanctuary that is exclusively open to groups of autistic and other special needs children, and then he took his friends on a tour of the property so we could spend the day seeing a bunch of other adorable and exotic animals.

Unlike a gangster drug dealer, Dylan wasn’t obsessed with stacking cash and hoarding every penny. He simply had spent too much of his life without a financial safety net and living with stress as a result, and he began to enjoy dealing on the side as a lifestyle thing.

He liked the fact that it let him hang out with friends more often because he could work slightly less, and he liked finally being able to be the guy who could tell his friends “Money doesn’t matter most in life, if you’re hungry I’ll always buy you something to eat, if there’s something you’d love to do and can’t I’ll always try to help you make it happen.”

Music was definitely his main passion nowadays. A number of his songs are up on YouTube and SoundCloud under the name “Ill Dyl”, and hopefully more of his unreleased stuff will be posted online soon.

We started organizing events based around showcasing his developing talent as a rapper, and even though he was often putting in the most money to rent equipment and book venues, he was also the one who insisted that we not be charging entry fees so everyone who wanted to be there could. The one time that we did spend enough money that we had to charge a small amount at the door, he took the profit and gave almost all of it to a different performer and then used the rest to take all his friends out for pizza immediately after the show.

Again, unlike the stereotype that has drawn up so far, he didn’t start putting out generic gangster rap tunes in order to impress ladies and rake in money. He started going to Hip Hop Karaoke nights as a way of overcoming his social anxiety, making new friends and finding a form of nightlife that he could relate to. Over time, he realized his skills were developing enough to try writing his own songs, and the first one he ever recorded was called “All I Got” and was simply an extension of a running joke about his friend refusing to pay a fair share of a restaurant bill. He recorded it with the help of another friend on a cheap computer microphone and was surprised when it started spreading, first to all his friends and then further to people he’d never met.

That inspired him to continue writing songs, all of them “comedy rap” and most of them not backed by commercial rap beats but with experimental music styles like big beat, hip house, uk grime, uk garage and lately glitch hop, mainly produced by his high school friends. Lately he had reached his most serious level, spending a lot of time developing each song and paying what money he could spare to book professional studio recording time for them.

He never cited gangster rappers or trap rappers as his musical influences – instead, he saw the Beastie Boys as one major influence, but would always say that his biggest inspiration was comedian Tom Green’s often-overlooked skills as a rapper. He actually drove all the way to Ajax the weekend before his death just for a chance to catch Tom Green on a comedy tour so he could tell him how much he loved his music, ask if he could record a cover of Tom’s song “Mic Check”, and so that he could give Tom a demo CD. Again, being able to do that on a whim and not having to worry about paying the ticket prices involved – that was the sort of the thing that Dylan spent his extra money on. Not guns, not cars, not strippers, but taking his friends to a Yuk Yuk’s so that he could have a chance to meet someone he admired and let them know that.

Something that breaks my heart is the fact that we had originally talked about throwing monthly shows, with each one landing on or around the full moon. Since he had started working again full time, he had to back out and could only plan one event every few months even though he was always working on new music – and if we had thrown a full moon party in April, he would’ve been safe downtown on a stage instead of being attacked at home last week. Ironically, if he had been a bigger dealer, he would’ve had to work less and he would’ve had the time to do that event. The fact that he was committed to his responsibilities above anything else actually contributed to this tragedy unfolding.

I wish I could say I had any idea who might’ve done this to him, but honestly I don’t. He could definitely get on people’s nerves when he wanted to, but I don’t think anyone who really knew him could ever think about doing something like this to him. It seems like these guys got word that they might be able to make a bit of money by doing this, and screwed up really badly and unnecessarily while pulling the job. Even though I originally grew up in an area where the prevailing mentality was “You don’t ever talk to the cops,” I know that this was not part of a cycle of gang violence and if I had information to contribute I’d be going to 32 Division and I really hope that if anyone knows anything, suspects anything, saw anything or even has a gut feeling about something that they contact the police or CrimeStoppers about this.

There’s definitely a lot of anger mixed in with the grief his friends are feeling right now, but a friend of mine gave me some outside perspective last night that helped me deal with it. While everyone really hopes that these people are brought to justice, she pointed out that they are already sealing their own fate by choosing a lifestyle of violence, and that no matter what happens relative to this case we can feel sure that somewhere down the line they’ll be meeting a worse fate than Dylan as a result of the mistakes they’re making and the path they’re putting themselves on. And with that in mind, I’d also say that I encourage them to turn themselves in and start working right now to get themselves off the path they’re on while they still have a chance to.

Many of us have been reflecting on Dylan’s recent changes in attitude and perspective on himself, his life, and life in general. He had been talking to many of us recently about how much more positive and stable he had finally been feeling after having struggled much of his life with stress, depression, anxiety, instability in his life and difficulty in his personal relationships. He was now saying that he felt he had finally reached a place where he felt all those things were in order to the point that he could now turn around and offer his advice and support properly to other people who hadn’t been able to reach that level yet.

Viewed one way, it is tragic that he didn’t get to enjoy that level of living for as long as he obviously was looking forward to. However, even though his life was definitely cut far too short, I have found comfort in the realization that at least he did make it to there. He achieved a level of personal fulfillment that many people never manage to see and that I know he spent a lot of his life believing could never realistically come true for him.

He made it, and I know he would want the people around him to be coming out of this experience able to be permanently closer to that place in themselves and closer to the people they care about.