Chit Chat Lounge, on Ember Drive in Decatur, a nightclub where murder victim Oliver "Poopoo" Campbell used to rap every Wednesday night. Photo by bob Andres / bandres@ajc.com

Candler Road

Barely a mile long, this stretch of Candler Road is where Poopoo Campbell’s life played out. Since he was a toddler, he had lived with both of his parents in a small brick ranch house two short blocks off Candler. He attended elementary school up the street and played youth sports at a neighborhood park. More recently, using the stage name Plug, he rapped during open-mic nights at the Chit Chat Lounge, a club just across I-20.

Nail salons and check-cashing stores. Liquor stores and pain-management clinics. A funeral home and too many churches to count. An empty storefront that once housed the Young Men’s Mentoring Center.

The Valero gas station, at 2587 Candler Road as seen here on Friday, Nov. 20, 2015 in DeKalb County was site of early morning shooting involving gang activity in the past.

Campbell liked to stay close to home, his mother says — away from commotion, away from trouble.

Diagonal to the club, on the expressway’s north side, is a Valero station. That’s where Campbell was shot to death. And a few blocks up the street, directly across Candler Road from his neighborhood, is Resthaven, the sprawling cemetery where Campbell is buried.

“He wasn’t in that gang — no gang,” she says. “He didn’t have no tattoos, he didn’t have no piercings. My child didn’t have no record. All he liked to do was perform rap and make everybody happy. My son had never been in a fight. They had no reason to take his life.”

He got into trouble with police only once. On a January night in 2014, a police officer stopped Campbell in east Atlanta because his truck’s license-tag light was out. The officer reported that he smelled “burnt marijuana” and, on the truck’s floor, beside Campbell’s right foot, found a loaded Smith & Wesson 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. The officer arrested Campbell on a firearms charge. A year later, prosecutors dismissed the case.

Campbell preferred sports to the streets, his mother says. A glass case dominates her living room, displaying trophies that Poopoo collected in youth leagues. The largest is for a football championship in 2002. He was 7 at the time.

As a teenager, Campbell formed a rap group, OneFive1K, with his lifelong friend, Dominique Boyer. He seemed to view rap the way earlier generations thought of sports: as a means of escape from a life that offered few prospects.

“Every time Plug made a new song, he let me hear it 1st,” his friend FaDaMoney wrote on Twitter. “He be like, ‘Dis da 1 dats gone be a hit.’”

Guns and money dominate Campbell’s songs, all set in a harsh urban landscape:

They owe me,

They owe me, nigga.

And I can’t get enough of their money,

Their money, nigga

Campbell and Boyer, known as Domo, were inseparable, Vernicia Campbell says. In the spring of 2013, both were seniors at Columbia High School. After class one afternoon, Boyer was hanging out at an apartment complex on Glenwood Road. An SUV pulled into the parking lot, and a passenger opened fire. Boyer was the only person struck. He died less than an hour later at Grady Memorial Hospital. He was 18.

Campbell was so devastated he couldn’t finish school, his mother says, and didn’t earn a diploma until December 2014. He visited Boyer’s grave often.

“Yeah, what the hell is going on?” Campbell says in a video he shot at the gravesite. “Over here come to see my blood … OneFive. Rest in peace, Dominique. Yeah. What the hell going on?”

He seemed to think he would meet the same fate as Boyer.

“Baby pray for me,” he texted his girlfriend on March 4, when she was several months pregnant. “I feel like I’m next.”

Campbell was working part-time for a lawn-care service. Success in the music business continued to elude him. At the Chit Chat, the club where Campbell told his mother he rapped regularly, managers say they don’t remember him or his group.

OneFive1K produced several videos and released at least one mix tape, a compilation less formal than an album that is distributed free online. The videos affirm how small a world Campbell occupied.

The video for the song “F&N” was shot on the corner half a block from Campbell’s house. Neighborhood friends, many of them armed, appear as extras. And the “Going Thru It” video concludes at Resthaven, where Campbell would later be buried, at the foot of Boyer’s grave.