Jessica Cohen, third from left, carries an injured man to an ambulance after a drunk driver plowed through a crowd outside the Mohawk on Red River Street during South by Southwest on around 12:30 a.m. Thursday March 13, 2014. Four people died and at least 20 people were injured in the hit-and-run. Cohen was working in the sound booth at Elysium when she heard about the hit-and-run, and she ran to help.
Jay Janner
The 40th anniversary edition of the South by Southwest Conference and Festival will open Thursday in a city shaken by a deadly downtown shooting that left four people, including the shooter, dead and 15 injured.
The gunman fired on a crowd of revelers at a cluster of popular college student hangouts on West Sixth Street in the early hours of March 1. The incident is being investigated as a possible act of terrorism.
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Two days after the shooting, Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis said she feels confident that the city has the resources to secure the event.
“South by Southwest will continue on, and it will be a safe festival,” she said.
City departments including police, fire and EMS coordinate on the event year-round, city spokesman Erik Johnson told the Statesman.
“We review permits for each location, including their security plan, before the event, and inspect venues throughout the event,” he said.
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Throughout the year, SXSW and the city conduct joint “tabletop exercises.” When the festival begins, they monitor conditions in a joint event operations center. The festival “deploys uniformed event officers alongside contracted security,” Johnson said.
“We have planned, coordinated and trained with local, state and federal agencies to support a safe and secure event for all who attend,” SXSW organizers said in a statement on March 3.
Johnson said the city invites the Austin Regional Intelligence Center and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force to be part of the operations center but declined to say whether there would be increased cooperation with these organizations in light of the recent shootings. He also declined to say whether there would be additional security measures at this year’s festival.
SXSW organizers plan to “continuously monitor developments and adjust as appropriate to help ensure the well-being of our community.”
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‘On high alert’
Seenachan of the Japanese band Tokyo Syoki Syodo performs the Mohawk at SXSW Tuesday March 11, 2025.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
“Having talked to management of clubs, everyone’s on high alert,” Graham Williams, head of the boutique booking agency Resound Presents, told the Statesman. His company is collaborating with presenters on several events during the music festival.
Security companies typically walk into SXSW thinking their priorities will be crowd control and theft prevention, security guard David Catran told the American-Statesman. Catran, a former Secret Service agent and founder of Texas-based security company Ranger Guard, has provided security services to SXSW events and brand pop-ups for the past decade.
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“Security companies, even local police departments, aren’t equipped to prevent terrorism,” Catran said. “This is a very deep change. The extreme political, cultural landscape, it has changed events drastically.”
“It’s very scary being in that environment and knowing such a horrible thing happened,” Williams said.
Austin’s downtown service industry workers are a tight-knit community. The staff at the Mohawk — one of SXSW’s most popular music destinations — are in shock, grieving, venue owner James Moody told the Statesman. They are haunted by a feeling: “This could be us … this is us,” he said.
“I’m always going to be worried about safety and security,” Austin musician Jeremiah Jackson, who is playing SXSW, told the Statesman. Before the shooting, he was primarily concerned about LGBTQ, queer and female performers, who are frequently harassed downtown,” he said. Now, noting that security in the Red River Cultural District can be “kind of lax,” he hopes venues boost security for SXSW.
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The Red River Cultural District and the Downtown Austin Alliance, nonprofit advocacy groups for the downtown area, both declined to comment for this story.
Moody said safety conversations between RRCD bar owners and SXSW have been ongoing and help individual clubs understand the broader security ecosystem.
“And then we obviously independently revisit all of our protocols, update our team from a training perspective, and then we’ll usually add security,” he said.
Catran said his company is already rethinking SXSW security this year, prioritizing violence prevention over more typical duties.
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Catran said he expects APD and other security companies to do the same, saying safety perimeters around events will likely be extended, with more personnel on-site than in years past. SXSW will announce road closures for this year’s festival on Wednesday.
“When we change the priorities of security, one duty will get more focus and one will get abandoned,” Catran said. “Security has to decide, ‘Am I preventing theft, crowd control, drug use, or am I focused on preventing a mass casualty?’ The face of security, the face of this country is changing really fast.”
‘We’ve been here before’
3/19/2011- Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN – Kanye West performs at Seaholm Power Plant during SXSW on Saturday March 19, 2011. (SXSW 11) sxsw11
Jay Janner, Austin American-Statesman
The city and SXSW began monitoring the festival together in the joint event operations center after a 2011 festival with several tumultuous moments. That year, 200,000 people showed up — a record at the time. They were drawn as much by side parties and the then-plentiful free booze as by the conference and festival itself. Events like a Vevo-sponsored Kanye West concert at the Seaholm Power Plant teetered on the verge of chaos. Festival organizers lost control of unruly crowds who tore down fences at a free SXSW showcase by the Strokes at Auditorium Shores and during a performance by Death From Above 1979.
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“People got out of hand — it’s not like 100 people got hurt, but we did a good job of responding,” Austin’s then-police Chief Art Acevedo told the American-Statesman in 2011.
SXSW hired an international crowd safety expert who conducted workshops with festival employees, Austin police and other first responders on how to prevent and manage dangerous situations.
“We want to be proactive, not reactive,” Acevedo said at the time.
Tons of people wait in line on Tuesday, March 15, 2011 to get a free wristband at 1101 East 5th street, for a chance to see the Fader Fort musical line up held Wednesday through Saturday.
Ricardo B. Brazziell, Austin American-Statesman
Over the next few years, as brand marketing spectacles like a giant Doritos vending machine in the parking lot of an Italian restaurant and free concerts featuring superstars like Jay-Z, Kanye and Lady Gaga dominated headlines about the festival, more revelers flocked to Austin for spring break. The festival’s darkest day came in 2014, when Rashad Owens, a driver fleeing police, plowed through a barricade on Red River Street, killing four people and injuring dozens. The following year, the city added concrete barricades to reinforce street closures.
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The crash happened in front of the Mohawk.
“We’ve been here before,” Moody said. “I don’t know if that makes us more aware or more hardened.”
While his staff feels sad and confused, they are also resilient. After all, the show must go on.
“You have to kind of just move on with caution and a little bit more planning and preparation.”
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A different kind of fear
Pedicab drivers (L to R) Alex Freeman, Heidi Nichole and Silas Wildheart were outside of Buford’s when the shots rang out early March 1.
Matthew Odam/American-Statesman
Attendance at SXSW peaked in 2018, when roughly 432,500 attended official events. Since the pandemic shut down the 2020 edition of the festival, crowds have been down significantly. According to SXSW, around 309,327 participated in official events, including the education conference SXSW EDU, and 203,313 people attended the festival last year. Still, the post-pandemic years have not been without incident. In 2022, four people were injured in a shooting on Sixth Street on the final night of the festival.
“Typically, the SXSW-sponsored events are handled well and done safely, but there’s also a lot of non-official events. All of it, when it’s amalgamated, can get intense,” said Grady Owens, a sound engineer who has worked the festival three times.
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Downtown service industry workers must steel themselves against a certain amount of violence, especially late at night, pedicab driver Silas Wildheart told the Statesman after the West Sixth Street shooting.
“I try not to stay out past two, because everything I’ve seen out here that’s messed up, it always happens right around two,” he said, adding that his work has landed him in the vicinity of multiple shootings. He said he has witnessed a fatal stabbing.
He was working on the night of the West Sixth Street shooting and initially thought the gunshots were gang-related violence. When he learned the incident was being investigated as a terrorist incident, he was shaken.
“I’ve got a son to take care of. I’m the sole provider in my family. I can’t go down,” he said.
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Still, he plans to keep his “head on a swivel” and work during SXSW. “That’s good money, I can’t turn that down,” he said.
Most sound techs happily work the festival, because “it’s the most profitable week of the year for us,” Owens said.
Jackson wishes there was clearer communication from the city, venues and the festival about plans to increase security at this year’s event.
“It’s really important to be vigilant and pay attention to each other. Community is more important than ever right now,” he said.
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He has been thinking about the 2015 attack on an Eagles of Death Metal show at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris.
“That was a targeted attack. It’s trying to scare us away from enjoying life and being ourselves. It’s important to not let it scare us away from going out and having a good time.”
Staff writer Matthew Odam contributed to this report.
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