Big Hawk dies

Why it matters

Big Hawk's killing on May 1, 2006, has never been solved. The Houston Police Department reopened the case multiple times over the next decade and a half. Witnesses came and went. The killer remains officially unknown. The case sits alongside Fat Pat's 1998 killing, also unsolved, in the same Houston police files. What the Hawkins brothers represented in Houston rap is hard to overstate. Both of them had been on the original Screwed Up Click roster with DJ Screw. Both had distinctive voices: Hawk's was deeper, slower, more deliberate than Pat's. Both had been making solo records into the early 2000s. Both had been part of the late-90s and early-2000s Houston commercial breakthrough that helped get Mike Jones, Paul Wall, Slim Thug, and Chamillionaire onto major labels. The losses of Pat (1998), DJ Screw (2000), Big Hawk (2006), and others in that decade-long stretch took out a substantial chunk of the original Screwed Up Click. The scene continued anyway. The scene continues now. You can hear what was lost on the Screwtapes that survive.