SALT LAKE CITY — Kentrell DeSean Gaulden, also known as rapper NBA YoungBoy, is heading to prison after a protracted house arrest and months of detention in Cache and Weber county jails.
Judge Howard Nielson, who presided over the sentencing in two separate cases, called the situation “unusual for a whole host of reasons and considerations.”
Gaulden, 25, pleaded guilty in September to unlawful transport of firearms in a case transferred to Utah from Louisiana, in which he was arrested during a music video shoot in 2020. The man pleaded guilty to a similar charge in a Utah case, after guns registered to his wife were found in his Huntsville home related to a prescription fraud case out of Logan this year.
In that case, Gaulden pleaded no contest to two counts of identity fraud, two counts of forgery, and six counts of unlawful pharmacy conduct, all class A misdemeanors, and was ordered to pay a $25,000 fine in November.
Gaulden sat slightly hunched behind a desk shared with defense lawyer Drew Findling. He was shackled, wearing a Weber County blue jumpsuit, and flanked by two U.S. Marshals.
A small cohort of family and friends sat behind him. The rapper’s Utah family, who have been in his life since he was 11, had “an important impact in his life,” according to Nielson, “a beautiful thing to see.”
‘A whole other side’ of Gaulden
Kyrie Garcia was 24 when she went to Baton Rouge’s Capital Middle School as part of an AmeriCorps program. “We would get placed with kids that had early warning indicators that they wouldn’t graduate from high school,” she told KSL.com.
Gaulden was in sixth grade and “wasn’t even on anyone’s list because he was kind of past all the targets,” Garcia said.
Gaulden “comes from incredible poverty,” according to Findling. He was raised by his grandmother until she died when he was 10 years old. His father was incarcerated, and he has been living independently since he was 16.
Garcia connected with him because she knew “he needed a little extra love.”
“He’s a jokester. He’s funny. He’s pranky … he would go prank my roommate, and he’d go pour water on him, like he’s just a funny kid,” she said.
As the months went by, “I got to know his mom really well and his family, and then he asked me to be his god-mom,” she said. Her family from Utah united with Gaulden’s family in a southern church to “make it all official.”
“It was a kind of a cool little moment,” Garcia said, and when the program was over, Gaulden came home with her to see Utah. “That was the first time he’d ever been on a plane or out of the south,” she said, and his mother “saw it as a good opportunity for him to see my different state, see a different, like, way of life.”
Gaulden tagged along with Garcia at the Boys and Girls Club, where she worked in Ogden. He would “just kind of help wrangle the children with me,” she said, or go to work with her brother. “We went, like, camping, played in the water; he would go snowboarding over by the park (near) my mom’s house.”
His first drive-in movie was at the Motor-Vu; they went to Weber State basketball camp during the summer. “He’d have the opportunity to meet some other kids his age, and he was always like a leader,” Garcia said. “All the kids always wanted to be around him and see what he was doing.”
“We just did normal family stuff,” she said, “and then he would come back out for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and as often as I could get him out here.” Gaulden was planning on living with Garcia while he went to Weber High School, when his music career “blew up,” she said.
“To me, he’s still just Kentrell,” Garcia said. In October 2020, she testified in the Baton Rouge trial to advocate for home confinement. “No one put the pressure on me, but I felt the pressure of the world on me. … If I didn’t do a good job and didn’t get him out on house arrest, I kind of felt like it was my fault.”
When the judge ruled in favor of house arrest, Gaulden immediately flew to Utah, where he stayed confined for the next two years. It was an “interesting time” legislatively, according to Findling.
The well-known Atlanta lawyer who represented U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in a 2022 election interference investigation in Georgia and numerous rappers, said Gualden’s “case kind of froze,” protracting the musician’s time in confinement. That was when Gaulden “succumbed to the pressure,” he said.
“He told his probation officer his mental health wasn’t well,” Garcia said. “He was asking for help, but our system just isn’t set up in a way to do that at all, really, or do it efficiently.”
Garcia’s hope? “I just want people to see Kentrell as a human, and there’s a whole other side to these things … he’s a human, and he has a good heart,” she said.
Last Thanksgiving, Gaulden gave all the kids’ families at the Ogden Boys and Girls Club Thanksgiving meals, she said. “They got this box; six to eight people could bring it home and have that. And he did that for thousands of people,” she said. When some families didn’t have rides to the building to pick up food, he bought cars for them, according to Garcia.
“He bought five people cars, just handed him the keys, and it was theirs,” she said. “And in that area, I know personally, there’s a lot of families that were walking their kids in the winter.”
In a letter she wrote to the judge ahead of sentencing, she said Gaulden “is the happiest when he is serving others, making them feel seen and loved.” Despite his past, Garcia believes “he’s learning and growing just like the all the rest of us are.”
‘The straight and narrow’
“I let my situation get the best of me,” Gaulden said to Nielson before the sentence, and “I take full responsibility.” He apologized to the court, his family and wife, admitting to not seeking the support he needed during confinement.
The sentence imposed by Nielson, in line with the recommendations from the bargain, was 23 months of incarceration and five years of probation. “We don’t know each other,” he told Gaulden, but he said that input from the parties makes it clear the pre-sentence report “doesn’t paint a complete picture of him.”
The violent charges when he was young, while important in the judge’s consideration, were taken with a grain of salt.
“The man who is sitting here before me is not that same man,” Nielson said, “and can chart a different path.” The judge said he didn’t see “a proclivity for violence” in recent years and hopes that Gualden will get to a place where he can make decisions that are “totally unfettered” by substances.
He’s “going to have to walk the straight and narrow,” according to Nielson, completing court-ordered substance abuse treatment and mental heath evaluations.
The judge admitted the sentencing “could be somewhat disparate” with someone with the same criminal history, but he believes it’s appropriate for the situation. The ordered term is the longest Gaulden has been incarcerated. “I think this is enough,” Nielson said.
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