Dancehall reggae artist Louie Rankin was killed Monday in a car crash about 100 km northwest of Toronto. He was 66 (even though he claimed to be a decade younger).
The Jamaica-born performer, who lived in Ontario, was the lone occupant of a car that was involved in an accident with a transport truck on Highway 89 near Shelburne, Ont. shortly after 9 a.m. on Sept. 30.
Ontario Provincial Police said Rankin was pronounced dead at the scene and the truck driver suffered only minor injuries.
Courtesy Ontario Provincial Police
Rankin’s wife Jewlz Sykes shared several photos of Rankin with their three children on Instagram and wrote: “There are no words!!! Sleep with the angels my King!”
Rankin, who was born Leonard Forbes in Jamaica, reportedly had four other children.
Among those paying tribute on social media are DJ Khaled and Nas.
He released the albums Showdown (1992) and Lethal Weapon (1993) and, just before his death, announced that he had completed another, Return of the Don Dada. “That album bout to drop!!! Can you smell what the Ox is cooking?!,” he teased.
On screen, Rankin appeared in 1998’s Belly with DMX and Nas, 2002's Shottas and 2014's We Run These Streets. In 2016, he made a cameo in the video for DJ Khaled’s “Nas Album Done” ft. Nas and he appears in the video for Canadian artist JD Era's track "Back from the Dead," which came out this past summer.
Rankin boasted publicly about winning a Grammy for 1992's “Typewriter,” but the Recording Academy, which hands out the Grammys, does not list him or the song in its online database of nominees or winners. A spokesperson for the Academy told CTV News: "We show no record of a GRAMMY win."
This article has been updated since it was first published.