Audio By Carbonatix
Sikwitit’s mom may have saved his life over the weekend. The Dallas producer started off his holiday with a familiar routine: Meet his sister and brother-in-law at their house in Rowlett and make the trip together to visit their mother in Carthage. The plan was to return the day after Christmas, but their mother convinced them to stay another day. After they got home they thanked their mom for saving their lives.
What’s really stunned Sikwitit is how close he came to an encounter with a tornado. They’ve made that trip countless times: They arrive back in Rowlett the day after the holiday, in the evening; he crashes and goes home the next morning. But this time their mother was able to convince them to deviate from their routine. “We were packed up and ready to go,” he says. “But our mom convinced us to stay around a little longer just to have more family time.” They would have arrived back in Rowlett just in time for the tornadoes if everything had gone according to plan.
Sikwitit — a renowned beat battle DJ who won last year’s Beast of the Beats showcase in New York in a field of over 1,500 competitors — was enjoying the extra time with his family in Carthage when the sirens started screaming in North Texas Saturday evening. Then they started getting texts from concerned relatives and friends. They started watching the news and theDallas Producer Collaboration Project earlier this year. His sister’s house may be demolished and rebuilt, but that has yet to be determined. Also yet to be determined is what exactly the insurance will pay for. In the meantime, his sister and brother-in-law are incurring all sorts of expenses saving what they can, replacing what was lost, setting up a makeshift home and preparing to go back to work next week. He immediately started posting pictures of the damage to social media and was touched by the outpouring of support. Now Sikwitit has set up a GoFundMe account to help pay for a new car as well as help his family deal with all sorts of expenses while they get the runaround from insurance companies. “We’re having to buy a lot of stuff,” Sikwitit says. “There are a lot of out-of-pocket expenses that we weren’t expecting just to get back to normal life.” Sikwitit has had some success participating in beat battles, working as a producer and performing as a DJ in Dallas and other cities. But he has stayed loyal to this one, even drawing attention to the diverse talents of local producers and studios with the weeklong Dallas Producer Collaboration Project. The project culminated with the release of a free beat tape and video documenting the collaboration. Sikwitit cheerfully explained the effort as a way of giving the music scene an extra boost. But now he finds himself asking for support. “It’s just very real,” Sikwitit says. “This is one of those things where you know it can happen, you’ve heard about it happening, but you don’t really get it until it happens to you.”
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