‘So many people loved him’: DJ Gio among two dead in Sacramento shooting, mother says
Giovanni Pizano, better known to his devoted fans as DJ Gio, loved Christmas. He’d give lavish gifts to his nieces and nephews, afforded by a long and immediately successful music career that was cut tragically short over the weekend.
Though he had traveled the world, he stayed humble, grateful and grounded. Pizano’s mother, Anita Razo, said he planned to buy a nice, big house in the Sacramento area later this year for his whole family to live in.
Instead, the artist who’d been deejaying since age 11 was shot dead at age 31, one of two men killed in a shooting early Sunday morning in Sacramento’s Natomas Crossing area.
“Wherever he went, he was a beacon of light,” Razo said in a Monday phone interview with The Sacramento Bee. “He had so much to live for. He had so many plans.”
Razo wrote in a Facebook post early Monday morning that she “watched the blood draining from his body as he took his last breath.”
“The monster that killed my son robbed him,” she wrote.
Razo alleged that Pizano was killed by a pair of men attempting to rob him of his diamond jewelry, and that one of the two alleged robbers was also shot dead in the encounter.
The Sacramento Police Department in a tweet early Monday afternoon said detectives “identified that this homicide centered around a robbery attempt,” and also confirmed that it was “not a retaliatory shooting” related to the shootout a week earlier that left six people dead downtown. Police said no other updates were available regarding the investigation.
The department in Sunday’s statement said officers responded shortly before 3:30 a.m. to reports of a shooting in the 2500 block of Amelia Earhart Avenue, where two men were found with gunshot wounds and pronounced dead at the scene by Sacramento Fire Department personnel.
“We moved to North Natomas because he thought it was gonna be safer here,” Razo told The Bee. “It wasn’t.”
The Sacramento County Coroner’s Office on Monday afternoon identified the two men killed as Pizano and 30-year-old Vernon Mulder III.
Mulder, a Vallejo resident, has a criminal record in Solano County Superior Court that dates back to 2010. The nature of criminal charges are no longer included in online court records, but a news story by the Vallejo Times-Herald said Mulder was arrested in December 2017 by Vallejo police on charges related to firearms possession.
Sacramento police called Sunday’s shooting an “isolated incident,” with no suspect information available.
‘This is it, mom. I’m gonna make it’
Razo recalled her son’s remarkable start to his DJ endeavors and how it all started: boredom.
When Pizano was 11 years old, his mother could no longer afford $800 a month for his daycare. So Razo, a state worker at the time, started taking him with her downtown, where he’d do homework after school or nap under her desk.
“He soon got bored of doing that,” Razo said, “so he asked me if he could walk down to the (K Street) mall.”
On one of those walks a few days later, Pizano came upon a record store next to the old Tower Records building. Razo didn’t recall the name, but it was likely Records Sacramento, located at the time at 710 K St. before relocating to Land Park and becoming Records on Broadway, which shuttered in late 2016.
Pizano then discovered that the store offered DJ lessons, which Razo said ran $134.
“I thought, that’s a heck of a lot better than paying the $800 for the daycare.”
His skills progressed quickly, and Pizano worked out a deal with his mother: she bought him $2,500 worth of DJ equipment, and he agreed to pay her back using money made deejaying.
“He paid me back every cent,” Razo said. “From the time he was 11, I never had to buy him anything. No clothes, no shoes.”
Soon Pizano had improved enough that he needed better equipment — and an Apple computer.
His family bought both for him on Christmas.
When he opened the gift, “he started crying and he said, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“He said, ‘This is it, mom. I’m gonna make it. This is what I needed.’”
DJ Gio’s success blossomed from there. By 16, he was performing at 21-and-over clubs in Sacramento and the Bay Area. His older DJ friends would sneak him in the back door, his mother said.
“They started calling him, ‘The young phenom.’”
Razo said a motto Pizano used often in his online media posts was, “Today is gonna be a mooovie,” always spelled with at least three Os.
She pointed to another tweet of his from a little less than a year ago: “When i die ... just look thru my camera roll.... i had a great life,” DJ Gio tweeted.
“So many people loved him,” Razo said. “I’m just happy that he go to do everything that he wanted to do. He worked with famous celebrities. He got to see places that a lot of people don’t get to see.
“He dreamt big and he made it big.”
Sacramento rapper Mozzy, whom Pizano has worked with, and Los Angeles hip hop singer Ty Dolla Sign were among those remembering Pizano in social media tributes, as DJ Gio was widely mourned online within hours of his passing.
“He’s even got a following in Russia,” Razo said. “He was doing weekly shows for a Japanese station.”
Razo and dozens of other fans and loved ones held a vigil Sunday night in Natomas Crossing for Pizano. Candles and flowers adorned a big, red “G” for “Gio” in the street near the scene of Sunday’s shooting, photos showed. The mother called the outpouring of support “amazing.”
A prolific artist, Pizano died in the hours between shows. He last performed Saturday night at a club in Modesto, and had been slated to perform Sunday at a club in San Francisco, according to his Instagram page. Promoters for each event instead posted tributes Sunday to social media sharing news of his death.
A week earlier at 10th and K streets downtown — three blocks from the old record store where Pizano first learned how to deejay — six were killed and 12 others wounded in the worst shooting incident in Sacramento history. Police have since said they believe the shootout was a gang dispute involving at least five different shooters.
Razo said she wants her son’s death to mean something. In a text message following Monday’s phone call, she told The Bee she is “so disappointed in this city.”
She wants to start a local nonprofit in her son’s name — a foundation dedicated to stopping “some of this crazy violence that’s happened in our town.”
The family has not organized any fundraising campaigns via GoFundMe or other crowdfunding websites, Razo told The Bee on Tuesday. She said any campaign circulating online to purportedly raise money for the family is likely a scam designed to profit off her son’s death, and that though she wants to establish a community fund, that will come at a later date.
Though devastated, Razo said she knows her son lived a good life.
“He always had big dreams. He accomplished so many of them.”
This story was originally published April 11, 2022 at 11:41 AM.
