Audio By Carbonatix
Almost three months after 21-year-old tattoo and graffiti artist Jonathan “Ynot” Corso was killed in a strip club parking lot, the identity of the driver who mowed him down has finally been revealed — but the new information leaves more questions than answers.
Corso’s life and sudden death was the subject of a September New Times feature, “Marked for Death”. His family members and friends — including members of the graffiti crew MSG, an illegal institution in South Florida for decades — have been clamoring for the police to press charges in his death.
According to a search warrant filed in Broward County court, the driver of the Escalade, who reversed approximately 75 feet in order to slam into Ynot and a companion, was 32-year-old Reynaldo Rodriguez. He told cops: “They tried to rob me so I ran him over.”
Ynot’s friend, also a graffiti artist who asked Riptide not to be identified, was injured but has recovered.
That artist and other members of Ynot’s party who were at the club have maintained that he wasn’t the aggressor — and his rap sheet shows no history of violence. “All he had ever been arrested for was graffiti,” says Quake. “He had never been in a fight in his life. He wasn’t a thug. He wasn’t a violent criminal.”
Police are reportedly still determining whether Rodriguez acted in self-defense. They’ve been stalling Ynot’s mother, Michelle Corso-Motolla, for months, at one point telling her that they were waiting for results from the SUV’s data recorder, a process that would take a couple of weeks. That was we when we were still reporting the feature — a month or more ago.
“There’s something not right going on,” MSG co-founder Crome tells Riptide. And though he’s powerless to get answers from the cops, you can expect Crome and other crew-members to take out their frustration in the only way they know how. “We’re going to straight-up destroy Davie.”
