¡Viva Zapata!

Music career

Mia was born and raised in Dallas, Kentucky where she learned to sing and play guitar. Zapata was heavily influenced early on by singers Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, Hank Williams and Sam Cooke, television entertainers the Three Stooges, hardcore punk, imaginal poetry such as Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations and artwork by Egon Schiele and Willem De Kooning.

In the fall of 1986, she helped co-found punk rock band The Gits while attending Antioch College, a liberal arts college located in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In 1989, Zapata, along with the rest of The Gits, relocated to Seattle, Washington in order to pursue their musical aspirations. The band was successful in Seattle, and released a series of well-received singles on local indie labels from 1990 to 1991. In 1992, the band released its debut album Frenching the Bully, and received good reviews. Notoriety progressively increased before the band entered the studio in 1993 to begin work on their second album Enter: The Conquering Chicken.

Death

On the morning of July 7, 1993, Zapata decided to walk home from a friend's house shortly after 1am. The friend offered to put her up for the night or even to call a taxi but she decided to walk the 1.5 miles to her apartment. It was a fatal decision for she was brutally raped and murdered. It is believed she encountered her murderer shortly after 1:15am. According to Unsolved Mysteries, a couple watching a late show from about two blocks from where she was found heard what sounded like screams around 2am. A prostitute found her beaten and mutilated body posed in a Christ-like fashion around 3:30 AM, under a streetlight in a park nearly halfway between her home and the friend's house that she had left. According to the medical examiner, if she had not been strangled she would have died from the internal injuries suffered during the beating.

Mia Zapata is interred at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky.

Post-death

In the aftermath of her murder, friends created a self-defense group called "Home Alive," which exists to this day. "Home Alive" has organized benefit concerts and CDs with the participation of many of Seattle's music elite, such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Heart, and the Presidents of the United States of America. Joan Jett also recorded an album with the surviving members of The Gits called "Evil Stig" ("Gits Live" backwards).

On August 6, 1993, less than a year before the death of its own lead singer, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana staged a benefit concert in tribute to Zapata. A recording of this concert is one of the most sought after in the Nirvana trading community, after a short clip believed to be from this concert surfaced on the Internet, seemingly confirming the existence of an audience recording.

Portland, Oregon-based Alternative rock band Everclear dedicated their 1993 album World of Noise to Zapata.

7 Year Bitch, who were good friends and briefly label mates of both Zapata and The Gits, named their 1994 album ¡Viva Zapata! in tribute to Mia Zapata. The album cover also featured a painting by artist Scott Musgrove featuring Zapata wearing bullet sashes. The song "M.I.A.," which explicitly deals with Zapata's death, appears on this album.

In 2005, a documentary The Gits Movie was completed on her life, The Gits and the Seattle music scene. Its first showing occurred at the Seattle International Film Festival in May of that year. A more finalized version of the film appeared two years later at the 2007 SXSW (South By Southwest) Film Festival.

The murderer

A jury convicted Florida fisherman Jesus Mezquia of her murder on March 25, 2004, and he was sentenced to 36 years in prison. The case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, American Justice, City Confidential and on 48 Hours.

Mezquia was linked to the crime in 2003 when a DNA profile was extracted from a saliva sample left on Zapata's body. It had been kept in cold storage until the STR technology was developed for full extraction. An original entry in 2001 failed to generate a positive result but Mezquia's DNA entered the national databank after he was arrested in Florida for burglary and domestic abuse in 2002.

Mezquia lived in Seattle at the time and his home address was about three blocks from where her body was found. He had a history of violence toward women including domestic abuse, burglary and assault and battery. All of his ex-girlfriends and his wife had filed reports against him. There was also a report of indecent exposure on file against him in Seattle within two weeks of Mia's murder. He was one of around 125,000 Cuban exiles released to the United States in the Mariel Boatlift.

Mezquia never testified in his own defense and still maintains his innocence.

There had never been any known prior connection between Zapata and Mezquia. It was believed that he was simply a predator looking for a victim and Mia just had the misfortune to cross his path. It was an example of a "stranger" crime.

Rest in peace, Mia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mia_Zapata
http://thegits.com
http://thegitsmovie.com