A rap crew's hope, loss

They would hear their favorite rappers boast of ''bling-bling" and ''thug life" on the radio. They were 12-year-olds, from a middle-class Dorchester neighborhood, but Edwin ''E.J." Duncan and Jelani Haynes thought they could do it better. With a used keyboard and a beat-box machine, they set out for hip-hop glory.

They first performed for the youth group at their church, lacing Gospel lyrics over secular beats so their devout Christian parents wouldn't mind.

They called themselves Graveside, a name that lent them street cred and made their mothers roll their eyes.

Four more boys eventually joined the crew, two of them from Wakefield, where Duncan was a Metco student.

In 2002, the six teenagers opened for the rapper Talib Kweli at a club on Lansdowne Street.

Fame seemed imminent. Duncan set up a makeshift studio in the basement of the Bourneside Street three-decker where he lived with his mother and stepfather. There, the group, now young men, composed songs about ''sexy" handguns and about bodies ripped apart by bullets.

This summer, they recorded a CD and began handing out discs to anyone who they thought might help them get a contract.

But last week, the violent world that Graveside rapped about collided with their middle-class reality.

Duncan and two other members of the group, Jason ''J" Bachiller, 21, and Christopher ''Fat Boy" Vieira, 19, were listening to music in their studio with a friend, Jihad Chankhour, 22, when officials say a lone gunman entered the basement and fatally shot them.

All were killed in quick, bloody succession.

Now, officials are trying to put together the pieces of the worst multiple homicides in Boston in a decade.

Police said they had obtained a warrant Monday to search a Ford Escort they found early Saturday afternoon near the Ashmont MBTA station.

Vieira's black Ford Escort was taken from Duncan's house on the night of the shootings.

Friends and family members said they did not know why anyone would have opened fire in the Graveside studio or why, in just one fatal moment, more than nine years of hard work and fantasies of celebrity had been wiped out.

''E.J. was all about making it happen," Haynes, 21, said last week as he fielded a chorus of calls from friends and family offering condolences. ''It was his dream."

Haynes's and Duncan's parents had lived across the street from each other in Dorchester and had never met, until their mothers were admitted to the same hospital before giving birth to the boys. Haynes's mother, Alveta, said the boys ''were friends at birth."

The boys became inseparable. They attended religion classes together on Saturdays, shared birthday celebrations, and found they were obsessed with music.

''We loved what we heard on the radio," Haynes said. Shortly after they learned to write, the pair began slapping their own rhymes over the beats they had heard from their boom boxes. By middle school, they were performing gospel rap at Sunday services at Eliot Congregational Church in Roxbury.

''We didn't have rap names or anything; we were just writing," Haynes said. ''We were developing our musical ear and seeing what sounded good."

As rap became increasingly commercial, Haynes said he and Duncan had grown weary of artists who referred to brands in their lyrics and rapped about the ''bling-bling" lifestyle of excessive spending and ostentation.

''What we wanted to do was something different," Haynes said. ''We wanted to take it upon ourselves to make something that wasn't about that."

In 1999, Haynes and Duncan invited two other childhood friends to start the group that became Graveside. The name was a play on Bourneside Street, where Duncan had recently moved.

''We couldn't think of a group name for the longest time," Haynes said. ''We were all just too young, and we just thought it was cool. As far as the meaning of Graveside, we never really thought about it. We all had different interpretations, I guess."

In the two first years, the youths practiced in Duncan's living room, rapping during the daytime to avoid disturbing his family. Duncan taught himself to play a keyboard a friend had given him, and the group started to create its own beats.

Their first official performance was in 2002 at a talent show in Dorchester sponsored by Coca Cola. Graveside did not take home the top prize, but the boys were not discouraged. They performed three original songs, but lost to a younger group who sang and danced.

''We never danced," Haynes said. ''We weren't upset that we didn't win. We just thought: 'Oh, they let the little kids win. OK.' ''

At the time, Duncan was enrolled at Wakefield Memorial High School through Metco, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity. That is the program that sends minority students from Boston to suburban schools.

At Wakefield, Duncan met Bachiller and Vieira and invited them to join the group. The original group members welcomed the Wakefield teenagers with open minds, Haynes said.

''Everybody has something good to offer talent-wise," he said. ''Beyond that, we were cool as people, not just in the group."

Each member had his own rhyming style, lending Graveside a unique sound that seemed to be gaining momentum.

In 2002, the group opened for Kweli at Karma on Lansdowne Street. Last year, Graveside opened for the popular R&B group Jagged Edge at Lido's in Revere, Haynes said.

Though most of the members were entering college, they still made an effort to lay out tracks during school vacations, always regrouping in Duncan's basement studio, a narrow space with electronic equipment, to play their music, and to dream.

''They were searching for a manager," said Alveta Haynes. ''They were worried about finding someone credible who could help them. They didn't want to be taken advantage of."

This summer, Graveside recorded its first record, entitled ''Offical Basement Files, Volume 1." The 13-track demo CD was produced by Peter Mazalewski, who hosts a hip-hop show as Mr. Peter Parker on WBOT 97.7 FM.

''They were happy kids, always smiling, always positive," he said.

Graveside hoped the work would jump start a recording career, Mazalewski said. Instead, three of the groups' members lives ended last week.

Drugs, robbery, and gang-related activity do not appear to have been motives for the slayings, police said. The absence of any sign of forced entry indicates that the gunman knew the victims.

Bridget Adams, who had been the Metco administrator at Wakefield High from 2002 to 2004, described Duncan and Bachiller as close friends who often visited her.

''They were always gentlemen," Adams said. ''They were very serious about their music. I never saw them ill-tempered or behaving inappropriately."

Vieira was said to have been the funny one, Bachiller the handsome one, and Duncan, the determined leader.

Duncan's dream, she said, was to be a music producer. He also played drums as part of the muscial accompaniment at church services at Eliot Church. But Duncan had experienced tragedy. His grandmother died on Thanksgiving weekend. His half-brother, Leon Bocage, was shot to death in Roxbury on March 16.

Chankhour, a close friend of Vieira's who had hoped to become a computer technician, was visiting the house to check out the recording equipment, said his uncle, John Chankhour. Chankhour, whose family immigrated to the United States from Syria in 1988, had taught himself how to DJ at family parties, his uncle said.

''They weren't gangsters," Mazalewski said. ''It was a release for them. It was like a movie."

Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at b_macquarrie@globe.com. Cristina Silva can be reached at csilva@globe.com. Donovan Slack, Megan Tench, Adrienne P. Samuels, Russell Nichols and John Ellement of the Globe staff, and Globe Correspondents Matthew M. Burke and Franci Ellement contributed to this report.