Red River Street closed off in 2014 following the car crash; photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.
Meredith Bradley was heading home. It was around half past midnight on March 13, 2014, and she was in her truck waiting at a stop sign in the Red River district of downtown Austin, which was packed for the annual South by Southwest Music festival. On the south side of the block, Kurt Vile was performing on an outdoor stage at Cheer Up Charlies. To the north, X and TEEN had just finished at the Mohawk, where Tyler, the Creator was scheduled for a one a.m. performance. Suddenly, Bradley saw a gray Honda Civic turn the wrong way down 9th Street, blow by a barricade, and barrel onto Red River Street. The car plowed through pedestrians before eventually crashing into a parked van. Bradley pulled over and called the police about a scene she described to me as "bedlam."
Four people died as a result of that night's collision. Dozens more were injured. The driver, then-21-year-old aspiring rapper Rashad Owens, will spend the rest of his life behind bars, with no chance of parole. Investigators concluded that not only was his blood-alcohol content above the legal limit, he was trying to avoid being pulled over on a traffic violation because he had previous warrants. In police dashboard footage shown at his trial, Owens — who had been in town from Killeen, Texas, to perform at SXSW — could be seen saying, "I didn't mean to hurt nobody, I was just scared." Despite his statements, he was found guilty of capital murder last November. And while observers called the incident a one-off occurrence that could've happened anywhere, the tragedy also served as a focal point for broader reflection about the growth of the nearly 30-year-old festival and, by extension, the famously "weird" city it calls home.
In recent weeks, as Austin prepared for its second SXSW since the crash, the legacy of that heart-wrenching event hovered silently in the background. This year, as with last year, concertgoers could expect beefed-up barricades shielding the Red River district. The city has also scaled back how many SXSW event permits it issues. "Two years later, we don't discuss it a lot, but I think everyone's hyper aware of it," said James Moody, owner of the Mohawk. "You feel it when the first crowd shows up. It'll rush back. You have this new fear that was never there."
Eight victims, including the families of three who died from injuries, sued SXSW and the city of Austin in December 2014. Two other victims sued SXSW, Austin, and Owens in January. A SXSW representative, citing the ongoing civil litigation, declined my request for comment and referred me to the festival's prior statement: "What happened on Red River in 2014 was a terrible tragedy including multiple crimes, for which Rashad Owens has been convicted. While SXSW is not legally responsible for his actions, we continue to have deepest sympathy for his victims and those affected." Representatives for the city did not respond to requests for comment, but previously said in their own statement, "We are prepared to defend against any allegations regarding the tragic incident, singular in the 27-year history of the SXSW festival."
These civil lawsuits are still in the information-gathering phase, said Bill Curtis, a lawyer for victim DeAndre "Dre" Tatum’s family. Curtis expects sworn depositions to take place by late spring or summer to confirm the facts about the festival's choice of barricades. "The families dread this time of year, and will for every anniversary of the death of their child and friend, and the injuries they still bear every day," Curtis said.
The people killed in the crash hailed from a diverse set of backgrounds that, in better circumstances, might be said to epitomize the vibrancy for which SXSW and Austin are known. Tatum, an 18-year-old from Fort Worth, was visiting SXSW with his girlfriend Curtisha Davis, who survived. Jamie West, a 27-year-old, had moved to Austin with her husband Evan West several years earlier from Indiana; the two were wearing helmets and sharing a motorcycle when the car struck them at 53 miles per hour, killing her and leaving him, as Jamie West's mother Shon Cook said at trial, "broken beyond repair." Steven Craenmehr, hit while he was on a bicycle, was a 35-year-old music agency employee and musician visiting SXSW from the Netherlands. Sandy Le, a 26-year-old from a Vietnamese-American family in Mississippi, had moved to Austin with plans of returning to college.
Eric Nagurney, who was Le's roommate and close friend, still finds it surreal that she's gone. “I remember feeling very numb at the time, because I wasn't prepared to deal with a tragedy that strange,” he said. “I woke up that morning to phone calls — none of which were entirely clear as to what happened — and eventually figured out that she was in the hospital and that it was very, very serious." Le was pronounced dead on March 17, 2014.
Lauren Zielinski, a former Austin resident and nurse who currently lives in Colorado, was at SXSW in 2014 on vacation. She can be spotted in photos from the night of the accident, wearing a white and black jacket with a black hat. In one, she is asking a police officer for more resuscitative equipment. In another, she's trying to help count out CPR. She told me she was at the eastern corner of 9th and Red River, across from the Mohawk, when Owens' car flew through the intersection, and she rushed to help the people who were hurt. She had crossed the street just seconds before Owens crashed through, barely missing being hit herself.
"I want the victims' families to know how hard we all tried to help in absolutely every way possible, and that their loved ones were not alone during the aftermath," Zielinski said. "I have intense vivid memories of talking to Sandy Le with other providers at the scene. We told her we were there for her and to hang on. I remember holding her hand as someone else performed CPR, and just an overall feeling of us using every single bit of energy to try and save her.”
Moody recalled a "fight or flight" feeling among the Mohawk staffers working that night. "We all go through life hoping that we don't have to see blood or pain, but when it happens, you just go into help mode," he said. "Obviously it takes time to coordinate emergency services. Our guys, though none of us went to medical school, had to fill that until it happened.”
It wasn't rare for those affected to wonder what they might have done differently. "I would always wish that there was something I could do," Meredith Bradley said. "I had a big truck. Why didn't I just move into the center of the street and he could have hit the side of the truck instead of everybody else? But you just can't keep thinking about those things."
Eric Sagotsky, a Los Angeles television engineer who was at SXSW to record video footage for SPIN, tried to document the scene with his camera; prosecutors later presented the harrowing results as evidence at trial. The full enormity of what happened didn't sink in until after he turned in his video to police. He saw a group of young people he'd filmed, who less than an hour earlier had been so excited to be at SXSW, now "sobbing" as their friend lay in an ambulance. “The impact of an event like this is not the same as a traffic accident or a targeted murder," Sagotsky told me. "When something like this happens, one person has the ability to impact hundreds of lives."
Since the accident, Moody points out that with the help of his friend, the Austin-based publicist Elaine Garza, more than $250,000 had been raised for the victims. "Not all of it has been used," Moody told me. "And I don't think all the victims know how available that money is to them." People who think they might qualify should contact the Austin Police Department or Austin Community Foundation. And in March 2015, the nonprofit Please Be Kind to Cyclists installed a permanent memorial, at 10th Street and Red River, to the four people killed in the crash.
The accident isn't all that has altered SXSW over the years, of course. In addition to the rise of the festival's interactive portion throughout this exceedingly digital decade, music programming that was once formatted like a trade show has grown into something far more elaborate as well. For many, the tipping point towards commercialism arrived in the form of a Doritos-branded vending machine stage, which grew from 56 feet in 2012 when it hosted Snoop Dogg, to 62 feet a year later, when its headliners were LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, and Doug E. Fresh. In 2014, Doritos paid Lady Gaga a reported $2.5 million to perform at SXSW, though she ended up not on the "#BoldStage" but at nearby venue Stubb's. The morning after the 2014 crash, the New York Timesasked, "Has South by Southwest become too big and too rowdy, and has it lost the original spirit of what it intended to be?" The question reverberated this year in a recent USA Today headline: "Is South by Southwest too big?" Then again, SXSW's magnitude enabled the event to line up a 2016 keynote speaker as prominent as Michelle Obama.
Moody acknowledged a balancing act. Economically, SXSW is huge for the city, with Moody likening the festival's significance in Austin to Mardis Gras in New Orleans. Still, he said that the environment around the music that has always been at SXSW’s core has shifted. "Back when we had record labels, back when we had a record industry, and back when we had A&R guys it was a real place to see shows and get discovered," he said. "It had that record nerd feel, for lack of a better term. And that has changed a lot." He said a "spring breaky" element of the festival's popularity, combined with the rise of sponsors that add little besides financial backing, have changed the dynamic of SXSW.
"It's hard to explain," Moody continued. "There's no silver bullet as to the shift, but it's that idea of popular culture and spring break and just the popularity of the event got in the way of just the raw discovery nature of what we love. It's still there. It's just now inside of all this other stuff."
The growth of SXSW comes as the city it calls home has ballooned as well. From 2010 to 2014, more people moved to Austin — 100,000 — than to San Francisco and Philadelphia combined, according to U.S. Census data. A new Hyatt hotel is going in near the Mohawk and Cheer Up Charlies. Austin's rapid expansion means that if longtime residents grow weary of attending SXSW, plenty of newcomers will be there to take their place. "I still see South By being super vibrant," Bradley said. "Yes, there's a lot of commercialism. But they also bring some really great bands that people want to see."
Moody emphasized that the crash happened to a congregation of music lovers. "Those were just music kids that were out there in that line, that had been waiting forever to see a band that they loved," he said. "And that in and of itself is just important to remember. As everything changes, there's still that. Through no fault of their own, they got caught in the middle of a freak accident. The best we can do is take lessons from it, and make sure we make things safer, but we don't ruin the spirit of waiting in line to see your favorite band. That still needs to happen."
Le was one of those young people who loved music. Nagurney told me he wished she could've heard the most recent Sufjan Stevens album — one that often devastatingly reflects on mortality. "I'm sad and a little angry that Sandy never got to hear Carrie & Lowell — Sufjan was her all-time favorite artist," Nagurney said. "[This whole thing] has cast a pall over SXSW, an event that — even with its problems — I did very much enjoy. But I miss my friend a lot more than I miss how I felt about SXSW."