The moment 50 Cent found out his mother died when he was eight years old
50 Cent had a tough start in life. He was raised in Queens by his teenage mother, Sabrina, during his early years, but that situation came to a tragic end after she was killed in a fire.
50 was only eight years old when he lost his mother, “a baby,” as he put it to Interview magazine in 2009. And, really, she wasn’t far from still being a baby herself.
Sabrina was only 15 years old when she had 50 Cent, and, understandably, life for her was very tough. A single mother, she started dealing drugs to provide for her son, which 50 remembers well. Every time she came home from work, she had something nice to give him.
50’s entire world came crashing down after she died. “After I lost my mom,” he recalled, “I can remember feeling like I wanted to go into a park but it was raining outside, and I felt like it was raining because my mom was dead.”
The young 50 couldn’t make sense of what was happening when he learned that his mother had died. “I remember when she passed,” he said, “and my grandparents told me that she was going away, that she was going to be in a better place — I didn’t understand that. Went to her funeral and everything and still didn’t understand what was going on.”
All that the young boy could understand was that, with his mother’s death, “everything that was good went away.” Everything changed for the worse.
The young 50 had come to associate his mother with the nice things she provided for him through her job as a drug-dealer, which, eventually, led him down the same path. He looked around and noted that anyone who had anything of worth around him was, invariably, involved in selling drugs.
50 recalled how the drugdealers around him used to call him “little Sabrina,” in reference to his mother. They took him under their wing, buying him shoes if he needed shoes and offering to protect him from being targeted by others in the neighbourhood who might try to take them from him.
“And that’s giving you a licence to actually sell the shit in the neighborhood,” he said, describing how he, like his mother before him, got into drug-dealing. “But even when I was selling, I had to do it between 3pm and 6pm, when my grandmother thought I was in the after-school program.”