A man identified as a security guard for Drake was wounded in a shooting outside of the rapper’s Toronto mansion around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, the police said.
The man was taken to a hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest, Inspector Paul Krawczyk, a member of the gun and gang task force, said at a news conference at the scene on Tuesday morning. The suspects fled in a vehicle and remain at large; a description was not available, but authorities said the shooting was captured on video.
The shooting occurred in front of Drake’s 50,000-square-foot mansion on Park Circle Lane in the North York neighborhood known as Bridle Path in Toronto, but did not involve the rapper, the authorities said. Drake was previously permitted to build fences twice as high as allowed by city law, citing a need for increased security.
The shooting followed a weekend of increasingly personal diss tracks traded between Drake and the Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar, whose long-simmering musical rivalry resulted in the release of six songs in 72 hours, including detailed attacks involving family members and claims of abuse against women on both sides.
The police said they could not yet speak to a motive in the shooting. They could not confirm whether Drake was home at the time.
Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which was released on Saturday and taunts Drake and his associates as “certified pedophiles,” features an aerial shot of Drake’s home on a map as its cover art. The track is currently topping the charts globally and in the United States on streaming services including Spotify and Apple Music. The cover is edited to portray the home as dotted with markers meant to represent the presence of registered sex offenders.
Drake has previously referred to the location of his home, which he calls the Embassy, on tracks like “7AM on Bridle Path.”
Representatives for Drake and Lamar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.