'Ready or not, you're gonna get shot': Rap video’s promise to shoot up schools goes to court

WEST PALM BEACH — An aspiring South Florida rapper who sang about shooting up his former schools avoided decades in prison after a jury decided his lyrics were just art — not a legitimate threat.

Police arrested Edward Leger-Berzolla in December 2021 when he uploaded a music video titled “School Shooter” to YouTube and advertised it with a hand-painted sign near Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach.

In the video, Leger-Berzolla raps about killing bullies at two schools he attended in Palm Beach County, lumping his former campuses in with Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Columbine High School — backdrops to two of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

“Ready or not, you’re going to get shot,” Leger-Berzolla says in the music video, holding what appears to be an assault rifle. “ … This is the last (expletive) time I say it before I spray it. I ain’t (expletive) kidding this time.”

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Leger-Berzolla, who pleaded guilty to assault in 2018 for threatening his neighbors with a machete, maintained that he never meant for the song to be taken literally or as a threat — just a brazen attempt at earning a record deal.

Prosecutors dissected the lyrics in court this month, urging jurors not to excuse the 26-year-old’s words just because they were set to music. Threats to slaughter, rape and kill — all atop footage of students fleeing gunfire in the Columbine cafeteria — “is not art, is not music, and never will be,” said Assistant State Attorney Nicole Corring.

The jury disagreed.

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Prosecutors have pointed to rap lyrics as admissions of guilt to crime since the 1990s, but Leger-Berzolla’s trial belongs to a newer subsection of cases where the lyrics themselves are the crime — written threats to kill, punishable by up to 15 years in prison for each count.

Leger-Berzolla faced three counts: one for uploading the video to YouTube, another for sharing the link on Twitter and the last for standing on the corner of Banyan Boulevard and Australian Avenue in West Palm Beach with a sign, the name of his YouTube channel and “School shooter – look it up,” sprayed in dripping black paint.

A passerby called 911, and Leger-Berzolla chatted amicably with the West Palm Beach Police officer who responded. He'd attended Wellington High School in 2013 and Palm Beach Central in 2015, where he said he'd been bullied for his long hair and all-black wardrobe.

"Kids who bully other children deserve to be shot," he said, according to police.

Leger-Berzolla warned the officer that her bulletproof vest couldn't protect her from a sniper-rifle round, and she warned him not to block the sidewalk. She left.

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A supervisor reviewing the officer's body camera footage searched YouTube for the rap and arrested Leger-Berzolla soon afterward for what he said he believed were "extremely credible" threats.

It didn’t matter whether Leger-Berzolla had the Glock, the pipe bombs, the chainsaw, the 9mm handgun, the AK-47 or any other weapon he rapped about using to kill bullies. To secure a conviction, Corring needed to prove only that he posted the video as a threat, or with the knowledge that reasonable viewers might take it that way.

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YouTube moderators rejected his first two attempts to post the video, admitting it only after he appended a two-minute long disclaimer insisting through gritted teeth that he doesn’t condone violence — a sentiment his public defenders repeated in their closing arguments.

In the minutes that follow, he warns of a shooting at Wellington High and Palm Beach Central High, and names an ex-girlfriend as “the reason this is being done.” Computer-generated blood drips down the screen.

He mentioned several other students by name and injected his own into a list of real-life gunmen: Dylan Klebold. Eric Harris. Nikolas Cruz. Eddie Leger-Berzolla.

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Leger-Berzolla argued that the names “just fit lyrically.” He said he’d also been bullied at Worthington High School, a charter school for at-risk students in West Palm Beach, but never mentioned it in the song because it didn’t fit like the others.

Conversely, he said he included “Lincoln High,” a reference to rapper Eminem’s Detroit high school, not as a threat to its students, but as a tribute to his idol, Marshall Mathers.

This speaks to the issue underscoring most trials where attorneys look to rap lyrics as a smoking gun, said Erik Nielson, a University of Richmond researcher and co-author of the book “Rap on Trial." For all their glorification of violence, rappers often assume over-the-top personas, he said.

“It's really sort of Literature 101 — understanding the difference between an author and a narrator,” Nielson said. “Prosecutors will conflate and combine those two into the same figure, and that is unique to rap."

In other words, no one believes country singer Johnny Cash "shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," or that R&B artist SZA really killed her ex-boyfriend.

Defendants in cases involving rap are usually young Black and Latino men — amateur artists without name recognition or the resources to hire a robust legal team to defend them, Nielson said. Eminem can rap about killing his ex-wife, Ice Cube about finding and killing an LAPD officer, "and those artists go platinum." Aspiring ones, he said, go to jail.

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Nielson, who tracks the use of rap lyrics in criminal trials, said Leger-Berzolla's case is unusual for two reasons: He's white, and he was acquitted — two facts the researcher said he suspects may be linked, though no qualitative data exists to confirm it.

Leger-Berzolla was released from custody Friday, and his music video remains on YouTube. So do his Tweets from 2018 where he expresses sympathy for Cruz, the gunman who killed 17 people and wounded 17 others at Stoneman Douglas, and urges others to get his own story "before it's too late."

His intentions were to shock, but not to scare, said Assistant Public Defender Breanna Atwood Friday. He "just wanted to be famous."

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Jury rules on South Florida rapper's vow to shoot up high schools