The Young Dolph murder case has concluded, nearly five years after the Memphis rapper was gunned down inside a cookie shop.
Cornelius Smith faced his final court appearance on May 15 and admitted to firing multiple rounds into Makeda’s Cookies on November 17, 2021.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison after waiting in legal limbo while the system moves at a glacial pace, with his plea hearing postponed multiple times due to safety concerns within the Tennessee Department of Corrections.
Smith testified under oath that he couldn’t even count how many times he shot Young Dolph, describing a scene of pure violence inside that cookie shop.
He identified himself and co-shooter Justin Johnson in surveillance video, confirmed they arrived in a stolen Mercedes-Benz, and laid out the entire operation with chilling detail.
Johnson was convicted in September 2024 and sentenced to life plus an additional 50 years, yet Smith, who’s been cooperating with authorities and testifying against other defendants.
Smith testified that Yo Gotti’s brother Big Jook put out a $100,000 dollar hit on Young Dolph, and the shooters accepted in hopes of securing a recording deal with his CMG label.
Smith and Johnson were supposed to get $40,000 each, with the alleged mastermind, Hernandez Govan, receiving $20,000. Smith received only $800 before his arrest.
According to AllHipHop, Govan was acquitted in August 2025 on all charges, which means the man prosecutors claimed orchestrated everything walked free.
Big Jook himself was killed in January 2024 in a separate shooting, and that case remains unsolved with no arrests made.
The feud between Young Dolph’s Paper Route Empire and Yo Gotti’s CMG goes back over a decade, with multiple shooting incidents along the way.
In 2017, more than 100 rounds were fired into Young Dolph’s bulletproof SUV in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Later that year, he was shot outside the Loews Hollywood hotel in Los Angeles, allegedly by a known associate of Yo Gotti. Young Dolph survived both attacks, released his Bulletproof album, and kept pushing forward until that November day in 2021 when he was shot 22 times inside a cookie shop.
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