In the early hours of July 4, a DJ just beginning to make a name for herself on the Houston music scene plummeted from the balcony of a high-rise apartment building, falling four floors to a pool deck below. The only other person present on the balcony that morning—the DJ’s girlfriend—said she watched her partner climb up on a patio chair and pitch over the railing.
“There’s no way I could have pushed her over” the edge, Nishia Jackson wrote in a Facebook post, claiming her girlfriend “was only able to get over because she climbed on to the furniture.”
“I would have literally had to pick her up & throw her over which is absolutely absurd!” Jackson continued. “WE WERE NOT FIGHTING!”
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Darian Lewis, who spun under the name DJ D Baby, died more than a week after being hospitalized from the fall, her mother said Wednesday.
“My youngest and only daughter has transitioned,” Terri Lewis wrote on Facebook, “please pray for the family, my heart is heavy and broken.”
Darian Lewis had celebrated her 23rd birthday only weeks before her death. Details of her 5 a.m. fall, which took her from the 13th to the 9th floor of the downtown building, remain murky. Her girlfriend, Jackson, took to social media just prior to the announcement of Lewis’ death, writing that she’s been silent “out of respect for D, watching so many of you turn this tragedy into something it’s not.”
Lewis, who usually “barely drank,” had been intoxicated that night, Jackson recounted. After being dropped off at Jackson’s apartment by an “associate,” Lewis rushed out to the patio when she was told she couldn’t drive herself home, Jackson said. The DJ then allegedly climbed up on the chair and “fell over before I could save her,” according to Jackson.
“I’m aware there are a lot of rumors going around & they’re all very disheartening,” Jackson wrote. “We were far from perfect. We had issues like most however, I would never hurt her whom I love, nor anyone in such a manner.” She added that she’d been “devastated” by similar gossip that Lewis had been trying to hurt herself.
Houston authorities have told local outlets that Lewis’ death appeared to be an accident but that an active investigation into the matter remains ongoing.
“We’re going to trust the system, and we’re going to let them do their job,” Darrin Lewis, the DJ’s father, told Fox 26 Houston.
Claiming to be the “youngest female DJ in Houston,” Darian Lewis was a rising social media star with more than 27,000 followers on Instagram as of Thursday. “She did things people that are 56—my age—haven’t done,” her father said.
Lewis was 12 years old when she first fell in love with music, according to an electronic press kit, playing both the flute and, later, the guitar. She was given a DJ controller as a high school graduation gift and began introducing herself as D Baby to her classmates at Texas Southern University soon after.
“The crazy part about is at the time, I could barely DJ. I saw going to college as a way to reinvent myself and start a new journey,” Lewis told VoyageHouston last year. “The rest is history in the making.”
