Big Hawk is shot and killed in Houston

Why it matters

John Hawkins, who recorded as Big Hawk, was shot and killed outside a friend's home in Houston on May 1, 2006. He was 36. The case has never been solved. The Hawkins family lost both of its rap-significant sons in the span of eight years. Big Hawk's younger brother Fat Pat (Patrick Hawkins) had been shot to death in February 1998 at age 27 while picking up performance money. Both were core members of DJ Screw's Screwed Up Click, the Houston collective that built the chopped-and-screwed aesthetic across the 1990s. Both had been making solo and Screwed Up Click records that were essential to the Houston canon. By 2006, the SUC had lost DJ Screw himself (2000, overdose), Fat Pat (1998, shooting), Big Mello (2002, car accident), and now Big Hawk (2006, shooting). The Houston scene had been bleeding losses at a rate few regional scenes in any genre survive. It survived anyway, partly because the catalog the SUC built between 1990 and 2006 is so dense, but the human cost is the part you should not forget. You can hear the loss in every Houston record made after.