On Monday (Jan. 16), Lil Tjay was arrested during a traffic stop for an alleged weapons violation while he was on his way to a music video shoot in The Bronx.
According to TMZ, police found a loaded handgun in the rapper’s vehicle.
Lil Tjay, whose real name is Tione Jayden Merritt, is currently behind bars as he waits to see a judge. His attorney Dawn Florio told the media outlet that law enforcement gave no reason to search the vehicle and that the gun they found does not belong to the “Calling My Phone” hitmaker. She claimed that he was just a passenger and insisted that the vehicle was parked legally on the street.
Florio thinks that the New York Police Department initially targeted the 21-year-old on account of the social media posts he and his fellow Bronx-born rapper Ice Spice put out to promote the filming of the music video for their upcoming single “Gangsta Boo.” Lil Jay’s arrest forced Ice Spice to shoot a video to her latest single “In Ha Mood” instead.
As previously reported by HOT 97, the arrest comes a few months after Lil Tjay suffered multiple gunshot wounds that almost took his life during an attempted robbery in Edgewater, New Jersey.