In 21 Savage's appearance on Shannon Sharpe's Club Shay Shay podcast, he opened up about getting shot on his 21st birthday.
At around the 53:30 point of the interview, as seen above, Savage, now 31 years old, discussed whether he would've returned to England with his father if given the chance. He then suggested it became clear it wasn't an option after he had his first kid in 2013, the same year he got shot.
"It ain't really feel different, but you know how you—in the moment it don't feel different, you look back on it and it's like, 'Damn,'" he shared, recalling how his best friend Johnny died that day in the shooting. "'Cause that day was my birthday. It was my birthday, [my friend's] birthday, his Mama birthday, and his nephew birthday."
21 started the day by planning to book a hotel room for the weekend so he and his friends could have a "kickback and shit." He remembers his friend calling him because one of the speakers in his car went out and he knew Savage had a car with speakers installed in the trunk. "He needed one of mine," 21 told Sharpe. "I wasn't at the house, I was with my other partner. He ended up getting killed, too. He was riding with me and shit, he was gonna get the hotel in his name 'cause I ain't got no ID, I ain't got no license."
Throughout the whole day, he kept telling himself he needed to see Johnny because they both had something the other wanted. "After he went to see my little boy and shit, I had pulled up at his house and he was like, 'Ride with me somewhere right quick, I got to handle some shit.' He was like, 'I don't feel like going in my car, though, let's just ride in your car.'"
They turned onto a street when a man jumped into the back of the car. "A n***a just jumped in the back seat and just was like, 'Get up,' type shit," he said, imitating a scuffle shortly after. "I be thinking back on a lot of shit. 'Cause even like after that shit, I used to be like, 'Damn, I done did like a lot of shit to a lot of people,' type shit. So I used to be, like, 'This shit could've come from anywhere.'"
21 Savage said he didn't know the two men who opened fire, and 21 claimed in the moment that he didn't have anything valuable on him, which he now says was a lie. "I had something else for him, not what he wanted," he said. "But he had something for me, too, shit. ... They was really scared for real. ... It was two of them, one of them jumped in the backseat, one of them was standing up outside the car."
The man outside the car shot him and ran off. 21 recalled telling Johnny to shoot the person in the back seat, whom Savage shot at one point during the altercation. "I remember the gun jammed, so I had caught it back again and when I put my arm over the seat, he put his gun on my arm and shot me," he continued. "So my gun fell out my hand, and I remember us fighting over my gun, then it went off one more time. Boom."
The "Redrum" rapper got shot in the hand during the scuffle and saw the man run away before collapsing.
"I had a iPhone, this was probably like the iPhone 3 or some shit. Ugly ass iPhone," he said. "I remember trying to unlock the phone to call 911 and my blood kept drying up the screen. So I remember I got out the car, but first, that's how I knew Johnny dead, 'cause after buddy got out the car and ran, I remember I told Johnny, 'Pull off bro, pull off.' And then the car wasn't moving but his foot was on the gas. It was in park, so the engine was like [imitates a car revving]. It was like some movie shit, the windshield wipers was like [waves hand back and forth]."
21 tried to get help from someone at a nearby house, but they didn't answer the door so he returned to the car and finally managed to use his phone to make an emergency call. He told authorities he got shot but he got frustrated by the questions they were asking him, including what street the shooting happened at.
"I remember telling them my brother dead, and then I remember...I guess the n***a who was driving them n***as, he came looking for the n***a who was in the back seat,'" he said. He worried that they were coming back to "handle the business," but the police pulled up not long after. 21 got out of the car again and was told to put his hands up, but struggled to do so because of his gunshot wounds.
After a minute of sitting on the curb with his hands behind his back, an ambulance arrived and a paramedic insisted that they take Savage to the hospital as soon as possible because he would've bled out otherwise. He got shot six times in total, with the gunshots missing all of his vital organs. Savage said he heard the man who was in the back seat got paralyzed as a result of the shooting, whereas he's not sure about the other shooter, beyond hearing there were some charges against him that potentially got thrown out.
"I ain't even want to really ride with him that day, 'cause I was really just trying to chill," he said. "We was going to get drunk. So I was really just going over the to kick it with him. ... But the main thing I think about is, like, I heard his grandma on the phone telling him, 'I'm ready.' Because he pick her up from work every day. And I just used to think, like 'Damn, I wish he would have just went and got his grandma instead.'"
Watch the full interview with 21 Savage above.
