The Gits were an American grunge band, formed in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1986. As part of the burgeoning Seattle music scene of the early 1990s. Members included singer Mia Zapata, guitarist Joe Spleen (born Andy Kessler), bassist Matt Dresdner and drummer Steve Moriarty.

The Gits met and formed in 1986 at Antioch College, a liberal arts school in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They called themselves the ‘Snivelling Little Rat Faced Gits’ (a reference to a Monty Python skit), but soon shortened the moniker to just ‘The Gits’. In 1988 they recorded and self-released their “unofficial” debut album entitled Private Lubs. These recordings did not see widespread release until 1996, when the album was reissued by the Broken Rekids label as ‘Kings & Queens’.
They quickly earned a following in the local scene and gained many friends, particularly in the city’s punk rock community.

On the night of July 7, 1993, Mia Zapata was brutally raped and murdered while walking home from a bar, The Comet.
Using funds generated by the Seattle music community (from benefit shows and CDs), as well as their own money, the remaining band members hired private investigator Leigh Hearon to supplement the police department’s investigation. For over three years, Hearon and the Seattle Police Department investigated the crime with few or no breaks in the case. In 1996, the investigation first gained national attention in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. The case was later highlighted on several other TV shows including A&E’s American Justice, Cold Case Files, City Confidential, CBS’s 48 Hours, FOX’s America’s Most Wanted, and TruTV’s Forensic Files.

Nine years passed with few new leads in the case, until a random DNA check conducted by the Seattle PD’s Cold Case Unit and the Washington State Crime Lab led to the arrest of Jesus Mezquia. Mezquia, who briefly lived in Seattle during the time of Zapata’s murder, was linked to the crime in 2003 when a DNA profile was extracted from a saliva sample left on Zapata’s body. The saliva sample had been kept in cold storage until the STR technology was developed for full extraction. An original entry in 2001 failed to generate a positive result, but Mezquia’s DNA entered the national data bank after he was arrested for burglary in Florida in 2002.

On March 25, 2004, a jury convicted Mezquia of Zapata’s murder and he was later sentenced to 36 years in prison, the maximum allowed in the case under Washington state law.

In the aftermath of Zapata’s murder, friends created a non-profit self-defense group called Home Alive, which ceased operations in 2010, organized benefit concerts and CDs with the participation of several bands, including Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Heart, and the Presidents of the United States of America. The Home Alive group has its own instructors and seek to empower women with ways to protect themselves against predators. They hold a range of courses, from anger management and use of pepper spray to the martial arts.

In her review for NPR, Sarah Bardeen found that “Above all, we fall for the music. Compared to many of their contemporaries, the Gits were instrumentally brilliant, playing fast, tight, classic punk rock which took a radical left turn when Zapata added her voice to the mix”.