Layzie Bone has opened up about the childhood trauma his Bone Thugs-n-Harmony groupmate Bizzy Bone endured, including a harrowing kidnapping.
Appearing on a recent episode of All the Smoke, L-Burna said (around the 24-minute mark in the video below) much of Bizzy's history was unknown to him during the group's rise as he never really talked about what happened to him, and "all that drama" Bizzy experienced occurred before he joined the group.
Layzie Bone also explained that he first met Bizzy Bone in school where rumors swirled about a "light-skinned kid" who could rhyme. Layzie's mother, a friend of Bizzy's father, encouraged the introduction, telling her son that Bizzy could both sing and rap.
At the time, Layzie's group was already gaining traction in Cleveland as the Band-Aid Boys before evolving into Bone Enterprise and then Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.
Layzie said neither he nor the other group members fully understood Bizzy's past until America's Most Wanted aired a segment involving his groupmate.
According to Layzie, BTNH had to maneuver through their own trauma while balancing success, which kept them from addressing their personal issues with each other.
"We was confused… we ain't had no mentors… it wasn't no blueprints, no game plan, some [of] us from the streets," he said before recounting how the group navigated significant events in rapid succession, from meeting Eazy-E and releasing hits to enduring the shock of Eazy's untimely death, which compounded the group's turbulence as Bizzy dealt with his inner struggles.
"The America's Most Wanted shit came on TV out of nowhere 'cause I didn't know what B was going through," said Layzie. "You know, it was personal demons, whatever, whatever it may be. I always tried to understand like what it was because I looked at what God gave us [...] So I was trying to understand Bizzy."
He continued: "So when that happened it was like we was fucking shocked, man. And then B went on a rampage for another couple years and we never really got to sit down and talk about, you know, those type of deep things in life. Life was moving so fast, man."
In an interview with Power 106 in 2019, Bizzy explained he was abducted at age four, along with his two sisters, by his stepfather while their mother was at work. The children were held for more than two years, with Bizzy being led to believe his mother and grandmother were dead.
They were ultimately found when a babysitter recognized his photo at the end of the 1983 TV film Adam, a dramatization connected to America's Most Wanted, prompting authorities to intervene and reunite the family.