Phone records showed calls between Birdman’s phone and the alleged shooter’s phone on the very night Lil Wayne’s tour bus was hit with gunfire.
A Georgia judge still says that isn’t enough to tie the Cash Money cofounder to the attack, and now he and Young Thug are out of the civil case entirely.
According to court documents obtained by Complex, Judge Eric A. Brewton issued two orders on Nov. 10 removing Thug and Birdman from the lawsuit.
YSL and Cash Money Records were dismissed too, clearing both labels from a case that has dragged on for close to a decade.
The suit was filed in 2016 by Alvin Lewis, who was driving one of Wayne’s buses when the shots rang out. He alleged that Jimmy Winfrey, better known as PeeWee Roscoe, carried out the shooting at the direction of Thug and Birdman, both of whom have denied any involvement.
Brewton found “no evidence of an employment relationship” between Winfrey and either label. He also rejected the claim that Winfrey was working as Thug’s tour manager at the time, calling that assertion unsupported.
The judge was even blunter about Birdman. Lewis argued the Cash Money boss set up the attack as payback for Wayne suing the label, a theory Brewton dismissed as “pure speculation and conjecture.”
That motive theory comes from a feud rap fans remember well. In early 2015, Wayne sued Cash Money and Birdman for $51 million, frustrated that the label was sitting on Tha Carter V, and the fallout was messy and public.
Young Thug was pulled into the drama around the same period. He was closely aligned with Birdman back then, and the original title of his Barter 6 mixtape was widely read as a jab at Wayne’s Carter series.
The shooting itself happened on April 26, 2015, after Wayne performed at Atlanta’s Compound nightclub.
His bus was rolling along Interstate 285 when it was fired on, and while nobody was hurt, Lewis has maintained the attack left him with emotional distress and lost wages.
Wayne and Birdman eventually patched things up. The lawsuit was settled in 2018, Tha Carter V finally arrived that September, and the two have since appeared together in public.
Thug, meanwhile, spent years at the center of the YSL racketeering case in Atlanta, one of the longest trials in the state’s history.
He entered a plea in October 2024 and walked out of jail with probation, so this ruling clears one more legal cloud hanging over his name.
Lewis isn’t backing down, though. He plans to appeal Brewton’s decision, which means the question of who was really behind the attack could end up in front of a higher court.
His case also isn’t finished at the trial level. Claims against Winfrey and Arnold Martinez, known as YSL Duke, are still pending, with a conference set for February to sort out the logistics of a potential trial.
