Boosie BadAzz has finally reunited with the childhood best friend he spent years trying to find, and he pulled it off by turning the search over to the internet. The two were inseparable in elementary school, close from kindergarten through the third grade, until his friend Derrick moved to Detroit and they lost touch the way kids do when distance gets in the way. Decades later, Boosie never stopped wondering what happened to him, and last month he decided to do something about it.
Instead of quietly searching on his own, Boosie BadAzz put the whole thing in public view. He went online and told his followers about the friend he had been missing since he was a kid, describing their bond and asking anyone who might know him to help track him down. It turned into a full blown search party. Boosie said flat out that somebody needed to find his boy Derrick, and his fans took the assignment seriously, spreading his plea across social media until the right person finally saw it.
The search was not without its speed bumps. Once word got around that Boosie was looking, a handful of people stepped forward falsely claiming to be the friend he was after, which is what tends to happen when a celebrity puts a request like this in front of millions of people. Boosie had to sort through the noise before he connected with the real one. His name is Derrick Jackson, and he has called Detroit home for decades, which explains why the two had drifted so far apart over the years.
What makes the reunion sweeter is what the internet’s detective work uncovered about how their lives quietly rhymed. Both men grew up to chase music. Jackson became a respected rapper in Detroit’s Downriver community and built a life there as a husband, a father, and a youth sports coach who stays active in the lives of the kids he mentors. Two boys who were best friends in grade school ended up walking similar paths hundreds of miles apart without either one knowing it, and the search Boosie BadAzz kicked off is what finally connected those dots.
Once they found each other, they did not waste any time. The two reunited in person and spent the day together, catching up and reminiscing like the years in between had never happened. They traded old memories about their elementary school days, laughed about childhood Bulls versus Pistons arguments and their Michael Jordan obsession, and generally picked right back up where two nine year olds had left off. For a friendship that went dormant for that long, the ease of it was the whole point.
What comes next is up to the two of them, but the hard part is over. After decades of silence and a search that could have easily gone nowhere, Boosie BadAzz and his oldest friend are back in each other’s lives, and the internet gets an assist on this one.
