The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 18

Mia Zapata left her Louisville roots for a shot at success with her band, the Gits. But death ended her dream, and her killer is still at large. By JAMES NOLD Special Writer "She was always one of those cool people you want to emulate hip to new bands, not afraid to read her poetry in front of other people," said Elaine Ford, a Louisville booking agent and talent scout who was in the class at Presentation behind Mia's. According to Jones, "It seems like she was always a step ahead of people in Louisville." Her sister said Mia always had a few close friends rather than many superficial ones. Jones recalled that the two of them would spend their spare time not at a mall but sitting and talking on the railroad tracks near Jones' Old Louisville home.

"She is somebody who saved me who brought me out of a really depressing state," Jones said. "I don't know what I'd be doing today if it weren't for Mia." Although Mia didn't conform to all of Presentation's guidelines, she didn't reject her parochial school education wholesale either. Marx-Edlin has a school photo of Mia on which she wrote, "We're going to be better off in the long run because we got a good education." According to her mother, when Mia heard a Seattle acquaintance criticizing parochial schools, she said, "Wait a minute. That's what made me what I am. That's what made me think for myself." College was a more powerful experience, and much less rigid.

"She really came into her own at Antioch," her mother said. Mia had a reading problem, one reason she had attended Presentation where she could get more individualized attention. Her mother believes she learned "by osmosis" in Antioch's less traditional atmosphere. Free-spirited Antioch "it's like in a time warp of the '60s," said Donna Zapata was also where Mia found a band. Gits bass player Matt Dresdner said he heard Mia singing at college open-mike nights and decided that he wanted to form a band with her, even though he couldn't play a note.

The band began playing in 1986. They originally called themselves the Snivelling Little Rat-Faced Gits, a name borrowed from a Monty Python sketch. They shortened it when the full moniker proved too hard to remember. Antioch's system of cooperative learning meant that members of the band were constantly leaving campus to take internships elsewhere. Each time that happened, Dresdner said, the Gits seemed on the verge of breaking up.

Continued on Page 6 The first part of this year was an exciting time to be in the Seattle-based band called the Gits. Almost four years after moving from Yellow Springs, Ohio, where its members had met as students at Antioch College, the group was riding one of those sudden swells of good luck that can mark the career of a rising band. Glowing reviews of its 1992 album, 'Trenching the Bully," kept arriving. Already headliners on the ballyhooed Seattle scene, the group had just completed its fifth tour of the West Coast. Major labels were checking out the Gits: Atlantic took the band members to lunch in Los Angeles, and MCA planned to see them play in Seattle.

The group had a new manager, dates confirmed for tours of the United States and Europe, and a booking at New York's New Music Seminar, one of the industry's crucial showcases for new talent. A second album was nearly complete; all it needed were the final vocal tracks. None of that incredible surge of luck and work came to fruition, however. In the early morning of July 7, a woman in Seattle's Central Area found the body of the band's 27-year-old lead singer, former Louisvillian Mia Zapata, strangled with the cords of the Gits sweat shirt she was wearing. Coming up empty Nobody knows what happened to Mia, last seen when she left a friend's apartment in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood around 2 a.m.

Police and a private investigator are working on the case, but their comments about it are marked more by resolve than by hope that they're close to a solution. Mia's brutal death has brought a rash of attention stories on MTV and in Rolling Stone, a benefit concert in Seattle featuring Nirvana to a woman whose art and personality, friends and relatives say, should have drawn notice on their own. "You know, you meet people and they remind you of other people? When you met Mia, she never reminded you of anybody else," said her sister, Kristen Vittitow, who still lives in Louisville. Even in childhood, Mia had been free-spirited and independent, the sort of toddler who takes off walking without noticing whether a grown-up is there to take care of her. Her sister recalls "Kristen, where's your sister?" as a recurring refrain.

She also had a husky voice that caused strangers to stare when they bang their heads in slow unison, their long hair swinging. Mia's friend Trish Marx-Edlin, now a social worker for the state of Kentucky, remembers singing such songs as the Pretenders' "Back on the Chain Gang" and David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes" with her. Mia also had a facility for making up songs on the spot. "I always thought she had a pretty voice, but I never thought she'd be a singer," Marx-Edlin said. Painting and poetry seemed to be her stronger talents.

In most instances in regard to her appearance, for example Mia showed a blithe disregard for what other people thought, but Marx-Edlin remembers that Mia was always "very sensitive to whether people liked what she wrote." According to her friend Christine Jones, Mia expressed herself in an intriguingly indirect fashion. "Instead of saying she'd find 10 different words to describe that without actually saying it. Maybe it was her way of making people guess what's inside her head," She belonged to "the rebellious bunch of the whole school," said Jones, a of student who is president of the Progressive Students' League. She was a non-conformist, a rebel whom most people called "sweet." heard it coming from "this tiny person," her mother. Donna Zapata, said.

The family moved to Louisville in 1974, when Richard Zapata took a job with WDRB-TV. Donna Zapata joined WHAS-TV a year later and became station manager when the Bingham family sold the station. (The Zapatas separated shortly after moving to Louisville. Richard Zapata is retired and now lives in Yakima, Wash. Donna Zapata is senior vice president of sales and marketing for WWOR-TV in New York City.

Mia's brother, Eric, owns a hair salon in Los Angeles.) The Zapatas lived in Douglass Hills, off Shelbyville Road, and Mia swam on a Douglass Hills team. According to her sister, she was nicknamed "the Bullet" for her quick movement through the water. But sports weren't where Mia sought her identity. "Her brother was cool, her sister was preppy. She had to find her own avenue," Donna Zapata said.

"She could be arty." As a result, her mother said, everything Mia did "was just a tad off." In high school at Presentation Academy, Mia managed to modify the mandatory uniform: Zapata remembers an Army jacket that Presentation's principal kept trying to confiscate unsuccessfully. "In (Mia's) mind it was part of her uniform." She was almost compulsively creative. She painted striking, expressionistic portraits; she carried a hard-covered journal everywhere. She and her friends would sit in the back during classes, passing poems back and forth. In high school she had a passion for 1960s rock.

Janis Joplin was a heroine; she also liked Rickie Lee Jones and the band T. Rex. A schoolmate recalls that, whenever a teacher would play music by such groups as the Moody Blues or Kansas in chapel, Mia and a friend would A fund for Mia A fund has been set up to pay the private investigator and to offer a reward for information leading to the arrest of Mia Zapata's killer. Donations may be sent to: Mia's Friends P.O. Box 12036 Seattle, Wash.

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