When I originally posted about the random senseless murder of my friend Andrew Wimsatt, I did so out of a sense of obligation. He was a close friend, and I’m a writer with a blog, so if I wasn’t going to write about him, who would?
But I’ve been stunned by how quickly the story blew up. Andrew’s murder has become national or even international news, from Fox News to the New York Post to even The Daily Mail in the UK.
Given that explosion of publicity, and Andrew’s family’s dismay over so many articles dwelling on the murder rather than the man, I felt the need to do another, longer post celebrating Andrew’s life and re-post some of the many tributes to him. He was a man of many parts, in the best possible sense.
The good thing, the heat-warming silver-lining in a very dark cloud thing, is the legions of people who knew Andrew coming from all walks of life, all different enthusiasms, to share what a great guy he was. Here’s one tribute:
I suspect being described as “the coolest dude ever” would have come as a great surprise to Andrew. As an engineer, Andrew was a geeky, goofy, affable, genial guy, and, with the sole exception of playing guitar, had none of the attributes the media use to label someone as “cool.” Our nickname for him (I think bestowed long before we met him) was “Goober,” or simply “The Goob.” And yet in a deeper, more meaningful way, he was a cool guy: A sturdy presence always looking to help out his friends, try new restaurants, listen to new bands. He was a quiet pillar of strength holding up part of the world, a vital cohort in numerous little platoons, each blithely unaware of how much he meant to others.
I knew Andrew for over 35 years, so long ago that my initial meeting with him is lost in the dim mists of time. For the last 30 of those years, he was a member of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy, a loose affiliation of myself, Dwight Brown, and a rotating cast of friends and family who go out to a different restaurant for dinner every week, everything from hot dog and taco places to high end steak joints. Andrew was one of our core members, and BBQ and sushi seemed among his particular favorites. So I’ve seen Andrew most Saturdays for three decades. We probably demolished 100 plates of nachos between us.
And it wasn’t just for food! A quarter century or so ago, we started watching movies every night after dinner, with Andrew usually joining us for that as well. We’ve watched everything from All That Jazz to Suspira to Zulu to any number of Godzilla films. (We have eclectic tastes.) After I bought my house in 2004, it became the de facto movie viewing venue, despite not then having a large TV. Andrew had a video protector he used for teaching classes, and for the first year or two, we projected movies up on a white sheet.
Andrew wasn’t just friends to us, he was a friend to my dogs as well. He would race my Great Pyrenees Buddy up and down the stairs (“Go up! Go up! Go up!”) to burn off some of his energy, and my Lab/Pit mix Avery frequently found her way under the upraised legrest of the battered brown Lay-Z-Boy Andrew always sat in.
One thing missing from all the praise flowing in over Andrew is the dark sense of humor he shared with most of our group. When it came time to divvy up the dining bill, Andrew would often joke “In the end, we will all pay.” He was a fan of The Simpsons back when it was good (which, I know, really narrows it down to “every single person in my generation”), and especially liked the 1996 Treehouse of Horror episode where Bill Clinton and Bob Dole are replaced by space aliens, often quoting the line “It doesn’t matter which one of us you vote for, either way your planet is doomed! DOOMED!”
And he loved a good Hitler joke. “You know who else loved to paint?” And after Dolly Parton died, he showed us an AI generated picture of famous singers (Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash, Elvis, etc.) welcoming her into heaven, only some wag had swapped out Elvis for Hitler. We laughed.
We grew up in the 1980s. Dark humor is just how we roll.
Long before I knew him, Andrew was a big music fan, and had collaborated with Karl Rehn on various musical projects in high school and college. We shared interests in Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Yes, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass and Slowdive, among many others. But Andrew’s tastes ran far afield and quite eclectic, championing such odd or obscure bands as Mr. Bungle, Tilts, Tobacco, Torche, and probably dozens I never even knew about. He was a regular attendee of Psych Fest and Levitation, the latter (which Andrew had tickets to attend) being this weekend.
He got into world music before I did, especially artists on Gabriel’s Realworld label. He was such a fan that he flew to England to work as a volunteer on the WOMAD festival. He picked up Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, all 300+ pounds of him, at an airport in a compact car, which must have been a sight to see. He complained to festival management about some of the ways he thought the artists were being treated, and received a snide, condescending letter for his troubles saying that he was being “disingenuous” and had a “hidden agenda.”
That inspired Andrew and Karl to form the band Hidden Agenda (now variously known as Hidden Agenda (of Evil) or Hidden Agenda (TX), depending on the music service, due to multiple other bands with the same name), which I would later join for (some) lyrics and vocals. The whole point of the band was to annoy people. We did a song called “Kill Yourself for Satan” and put Christian back-masking in, just so we could piss off everyone. See the FAQ (and ignore the security warning) for more details of what tremendous smartasses we were in our 20s. More recently Andrew had been playing with transforming Hidden Agenda songs into even more mutated forms via AI tools like Suno.
Apart from his myriad interests, Andrew spent his working life as a civil engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation and associated institutes. He seemed particularly proud of the Mobile Load Simulator, a giant machine he worked on to help test pavement to destruction. He was also a certified bridge inspector, and used to joke about closing bridges, setting them on fire, and then reopening them to see cars race through the flames. Here’s a video of Andrew giving a lecture on pavement fatigue.
Since so many in our group read science fiction, and Andrew came from a literary academic family, it was natural that we got him reading SF as well, and he subscribed to Nova Express, the SF critical fanzine I used to edit. He became a big fan of Howard Waldrop, another close friend of mine. I sold Andrew several of Howard’s books (among others) over the years.
Karl got Andrew into guns and shooting. He would go out on our group’s occasional trips to the range, see our various guns, and go “Ooo, I want that!” He eventually acquired quite a collection. We all greatly admired his ridiculously powerful (and loud) Desert Eagle.
Andrew had been following Iowahawk on Twitter for a while, and we went to a meetup when he moved to Austin. Andrew joined his orbit as a car enthusiast, frequently attending the Hot Rod Meetups at Top Notch Hamburgers, and other classic car events. Here’s a tribute from Iowahawk:
I won’t belabor the terrible circumstances of his death, which have been discussed in depth online recently. I am as angry and upset about his murder as anyone, but my car ID threads are designed as a sanctuary from the woes of the contemporary world. I would rather spare that anger for a different forum and choose here to focus on Andrew Wimsatt, the human being. He was a relentlessly cheerful and positive soul, I hope you will respect his spirit in your replies.
I think our mutual friend @AnnaZ perfectly summed up Andrew as “everybody’s biggest fan.” His various fandoms include countless bands, visual artists, podcasters, @wethefifth, @reason, @uaustinorg, and @TheFIREorg. And I am humbled that one of his fandoms was Dave’s Car ID Service.
You may have noticed from reading the various tributes to him over the past few days his adjectives: kind, generous, warm, positive, never had an unkind word about anyone. All true. But he seldom spoke about himself, despite having a very distinguished career as a civil engineer in road materials research. He was far more interested in talking about you, with zero expectation of anything in return. He was the least transactional person in a hyper-transactional world.
If you were lucky enough to have Andrew as a fan he was generous with his time and support, and in my case, that support included loads of his old family photos with mystery cars.
I can’t fully repay my debt to him for that. But I’d like to dedicate this episode of Dave’s Car ID Service to him, and use those photos to illustrate the life a genuine mensch.
“Least transactional person” seems right. I know if I were friends with important media personalities, the urge to blurt out “Put me on! Put me on! I’m smart and funny and well-spoken and ever so cleeeever!” would be overwhelming.
Andrew was firmly on the conservative-to-libertarian spectrum. He was a fan of this blog (and my Twitter account, before the ancien regime suspended it (which I never managed to get lifted)). I hold small election night gatherings at my house every two years where we eat pizza and watch returns roll in, and Andrew was a regular attendee. He was here in 2020, where we called it a night just before 3 AM, convinced President Trump had been reelected only to wake up to those mysterious 4:30 AM ballot drops.
He was a big fan of Gutfeld! and The Five. Such a fan that he started working behind the scenes compiling music and clips for them. Greg Gutfeld offered up a tribute to him on The Five:
More:
He was also a big fan of the libertarian We the Fifth podcast, and Matt Walsh put up this tribute.
We come here to remember and celebrate and express gratitude toward our friend Andrew, whose name will be etched permanently on our under-construction sixth floor recording studio, probably within the area where Never Fly Coachers will be invited to watch us podcast live. Busty, after all, probably witnessed us recording more than any other fan—coming to all the live shows except one, raising his hand on every damned Second Sunday, pouring drinks around the (very!) Stupid Table for Special Dispatch #34, post-gaming an episode or three back when we recorded at the DIY Paloma Media studio.
Andrew first buzzed across my radar in December 2013 when, over the course of a few days, three things happened for the first time: 1) The Independents television show, starring MTV’s Kennedy, Kmele, and myself, debuted on the Fox Business Network; 2) Wimsatt started following me on Twitter, and 3) he gave a four-figure donation to the Reason Foundation during our annual Webathon. It makes sense that these were related: Andrew l-o-v-e-d music, he adored the anarchic energy of Fox’s legendary late-nite show Red Eye (his pinned tweet for the past decade has been a celebration/compilation of Greg Gutfeld’s chosen outro music on The Five), and he was long attracted to the no-nonsense, structural-engineering ethos of Reason Foundation transportation-policy stalwart Bob Poole, whose annual highway report Andrew suggested improvements for.
We hung out for the first time in Austin back in September 2018, after which he started doing what Andrew Wimsatt does, which is send us (or just tweet out) clips of all us + others in the extended Fifth Column/Red Eye multiverse whenever we’d appear on other media. He was famously much quicker on the draw publicizing a new Fifth Column episode than any of the drunk co-hosts, and at some early point we just gave him the keys to our Facebook page. And oh yeah, did I know he actually saved most of the entire run of The Independents? (You can watch a few over at the Paloma Media YouTube page, which was chiefly the fruit of his labors.) When we started doing Patreon in November 2019, and created what we thought was an absurd, no-one-will-ever-go-there level of $50-a-month subscriptions, Andrew became one of the first few to Never Fly Coach. He would come to New York several times a year, including the last couple during our annual sojourns to the Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown. I took calling him “Busty,” for the very stupid reason that a funny British friend of mine back in the ‘90s would always refer to Kate Winslet as “Busty Winslet,” and this very accomplished transportation engineer not only took it in stride, he kind of beamed a bit when the nickname caught on in the community.
So that’s where the “Busty” nickname came, which I swear I never heard before he died.
Here’s one from Nancy Rommelmann, who Andrew brought as a guest to an SDC many moons ago.
Do you know those friends who seem to always have been around and you don’t recall when you first met? Andrew was like that, though the not-remembering could be because Andrew was so unprepossessing, mild and kind and never wanting to intrude, while in fact being both whip-smart and the person so many, many, many of us relied on to spread the word about our work. The Fifth Column, of which there was no bigger fan, had just about zero visibility, in terms of clips, until Andrew started to create them, quietly tugging the pod onto a bigger and bigger stage. Matt wrote yesterday about some of Andrew’s quiet, steady work on behalf of others.
Since Andrew’s absolutely senseless murder, we have learned that he did not just signal boost the Fifth, as he had for more than a decade for Red Eye and Greg Gutfield and anything involving Kat Timpf, all of whom have posted their shock and remembrance, but for others, some I have never heard of.
It is exactly like Andrew not to shine any spotlight on himself. He saw people whose work he liked, probably chortled to himself (he had a good deep chortle) that they could use a little help archiving that work, then did it and them the clips. I literally have a score of these clips from him, as well as twice as many SOSs.
Snip.
I can almost guarantee you that Matt and I would have been texting Andrew that Thursday morning about the frozen computer, and that no matter where he was or what he was doing, Andrew would have responded immediately to tell us how to fix it or that he’d be on it as soon as he was by his laptop.
Snip.
He was also – and I learning this more and more as the days go by and we touch base with people Andrew knew – a Zelig of sorts, appearing wherever you were gathered, at a Fifth live show in LA, at a Cuckoo’s Nest remembrance in Tulsa, at a meet-up in Chicago. As his friend Karl Rehn told me last week, “You’d say to Andrew, ‘I’m going to such and such music show in New Jersey,’ or Las Vegas, and he’d say, ‘Great, I’ll meet you there.’” Andrew always showed up.
More tributes:
Andrew Wimsatt spent his life figuring out how to make things last longer.
Roads, bridges, tunnels, pavement, friendships.
He held three civil engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, spent 18 years at TxDOT, ten of them as Fort Worth District Pavement Engineer, and in 2006 joined the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where he eventually ran the Materials and Pavements Division and its $9 million annual research program. He worked on ground-penetrating radar, nondestructive testing, asset management.
Describing the work once, he said the real challenge wasn’t building new things; it was making what we already have last longer.
Andrew made what we already have last longer.
He was an obsessive live-music fan who would fly across the country to see a band. He loved Slowdive. In 2023 he was recommending “Souvlaki” and “everything is alive” to anyone who’d listen, singled out their cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair,” and admitted that when he heard them play it at FYF in 2014, he teared up. In 2016, when bad weather killed Levitation and Slowdive threw together a surprise show at the Scoot Inn, Andrew happened to be sitting at his computer and grabbed two $7.50 tickets in the roughly two minutes before it sold out. Then he recorded the entire set on his iPhone for a friend.
I was the one who used the other ticket. And Andrew got to know at least two members of Slowdive (and possible all of them), one of whom, Simon Scott, helped engineer an album with him.
He made music too. He’d been in bands with Karl Rehn since high school, engineered their home cassette recordings in the early 1980s, and in 1990 released “Reflections” under the name the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, cut at Sixth Street Studio. He and Rehn made music videos that ran for years on Austin’s ACTV, and contributed to the score of a 1994 documentary about Barton Springs.
And more tributes:
I could have posted dozens if not hundreds more tributes. It seems both overwhelming and strangely inadequate.
I didn’t anticipate how big the story of Andrew’s murder would be, though I probably should have. The parallels with Iryna Zarutska’s murder are painfully obvious. My initial post may or may not have been the first pebble that started that avalanche, but when your friend’s murder in Texas is news in England and India, many including the tuxedo photo I took of Andrew at A.T. and Carol Campbell’s wedding that accompanied my initial blog post, it tends to give you pause.
And now politicians, including some I support, are coming out of the woodwork to talk about his murder.
I’m pretty sure Dustin Burrows couldn’t have picked Andrew out of a lineup with a gun to his head.
It’s weird to see someone you knew transformed from a man into a martyr for a cause less than a week after his death. Even if it’s a cause you believe in. Even if it’s done by your side. Unsettling. And maybe a little unseemly.
Politics has been played as a blood sport for a long, long time, and I’ve delivered my fair share of rhetorical blows. But the flood of stories had me going “Wait, that detail is not quite right,” and made me wonder how many errors I’ve unwittingly spread here reposting “hot takes” on different stories.
It’s the modern condition. Or the post-modern condition. For a long time, Americans naively believed we had a news media that at least tried to report objectively, but the rise of the alternate news sources on the Internet proved that wasn’t so. But it’s particularly hard watching the sausage being made when it’s someone you know being fed into the machine. (Probably the wrong metaphor to use here.)
As the pitted olive on top of this shit sandwich, Nancy Rommelmann sent me a note pointing out that some scumbag scammer is raising money in Andrew’s name. Losing someone is bad enough without the human cockroaches shuffling out of the shadows to feed. Here’s a form to complain to. Update: In a tiny bit of good news, the scam fundraiser for Andrew has been “unpublished.”
I’m in touch with Andrew’s family, and once they get together any sort of fundraiser (and an obituary and memorial website, etc.), I’ll let you know here.
It still feels a bit overwhelming. This post is pretty long already, but I fear I haven’t adequately captured the smart, goofy friend I knew. But it will have to do.
Feel free to share memories of Andrew in the comments below.
