How did Brandon die in The Chi? His death never made it on screen
The Chi ran seven seasons and wrapped up this summer on its own terms, which is rare for a Black drama and rarer still for one that lost its lead actor before Season 3.
Brandon Johnson, the chef with the food truck dream, was the heart of the first two seasons. Then Season 3 opened with his funeral. No death scene, no last episode, just his mother at a podium.
The on-screen version
Season 3 begins with Laverne, Brandon's mom, delivering a eulogy for both her sons. Coogie was killed in the pilot; now Brandon is gone too. She blames the city:
"They were all I had, and this city took them from me."
That was it for a full season. The show pivoted hard to Kevin, Jake, Papa and Emmett, and Brandon's storylines and supporting characters just evaporated. Fans spent a year asking a question the show wouldn't answer.
The answer, eventually
Season 4 finally filled in the blank. After Laverne shoots Douda, the gangster-turned-politician, he admits he had something to do with Brandon's death. The reason: Brandon had been talking to the police. In The Chi's South Side, snitching gets you killed, and Douda is the one who arranged it.
So the canonical answer is that Brandon was murdered on Douda's orders for cooperating with cops, and it happened off screen because the actor who played him was no longer employed by the show.
The off-screen version
Jason Mitchell was fired in May 2019 after misconduct allegations from co-star Tiffany Boone, who played Brandon's girlfriend Jerrika, and from Season 2 showrunner Ayanna Floyd Davis. Boone asked to be released from the show. Davis told the trade press she had to report Mitchell to HR herself after he turned on her.
Showtime's Gary Levine confirmed at the time that the character would be written out via death, in a quote that reads like a shrug in a suit (Distractify has it):
"There is a lot of great life in The Chi and there's also death in The Chi and that's how we'll be dealing with it."
Series creator Lena Waithe later said on The Breakfast Club that she'd confronted Mitchell directly after Season 1. Per SlashFilm:
"There was definitely a conversation where I called him and got really real. 'You need to be respectful of any woman on set. You need to be respectful of everybody.'"
Mitchell has told a different story, claiming the real reason was money and a corporate ownership change. The people who run the show have never agreed with that version.
Why the funeral-cold-open was the move
The show had a few options and picked the least dramatic one on purpose:
- Recast Brandon: not on a show this grounded, not for a character this central
- Write him leaving Chicago: doesn't fit a character who'd just decided to stay and build something
- Kill him off screen and let his mother's grief do the work: what they did, and what let the show keep its tone
It's the House of Cards approach, minus the pretense that anyone planned it.
Where it left the show
Waithe told The Hollywood Reporter around the finale that after Mitchell's exit, the series "changed dramatically." It did. The Chi that ended in 2026 is an Emmett-and-Kiesha show with a long shadow at its center, and the shadow has a name.
Brandon died because he talked to the police. The show had to say it a year late, and only because it had no other choice.
