Damián Beckford¶
Damián Beckford, called Dame by his sisters, was the eldest child of Nadine Beckford and Joaquín Peralta and the older brother of singer Nadia Beckford. The first musician in the household after their mother, he was the one who heard Nadia singing under her breath as a girl and pulled her out from behind it, hyping her voice and pushing her toward her first open mic. He was killed in Paterson, New Jersey in 2023 at the age of twenty-one. His death, and the grief it left in his sister, became the wound that shaped Nadia’s guardedness, her art, and her recognition of the same grief in Ezra Cruz.
Early Life¶
Damián was born around 2002 in Paterson, New Jersey, the oldest of the three Beckford-Peralta children. His mother, Nadine, was a Jamaican singer whose voice filled the apartment through church songs and reggae; his father, Joaquín, was Dominican, bringing merengue and bachata and Spanish into the same rooms. Damián grew up at the meeting point of both islands, and he was the child who took most directly after their mother’s music. He sang constantly, learned reggae and R&B by ear, and carried himself with the easy charisma of someone who belonged onstage before he ever stood on one.
He was openly gay, and in a household his sisters would describe as loving and whole, he was accepted as himself. That openness was not without risk in the world beyond the apartment, but Damián refused to make himself smaller for it.
Relationship with Nadia¶
Damián was the person who made Nadia Beckford a singer out loud. He caught her humming and singing to herself, recognized what their mother’s voice had passed down, and would not let her keep it hidden. He told her she had it. He pushed her toward the first open mic she ever played and hyped her relentlessly, the older brother convinced of his little sister’s gift before anyone outside the family had heard it.
That inheritance is why Nadia’s grief lives in her voice. After his death she carried him in her singing, and her personal motto—“You’re going to feel me”—took on a second meaning: she performs, in part, for the brother who never got to see where the voice he believed in would go. Her younger sister Jaz, the third sibling, became her closest person in the aftermath, the two surviving children holding the space where Damián had been.
Death¶
In 2023, when Damián was twenty-one and Nadia seventeen, he was walking home in Paterson with his boyfriend. The two of them were singing along to music playing through his headphones when they were attacked, and Damián was shot and killed.
Whether the attack was targeted—whether Damián’s queerness, his being openly with another young man, was the reason—or whether it was the kind of street violence the world treats as ordinary was never established, never proven, and never resolved. For the Beckford-Peralta family, the absence of an answer became a second wound layered beneath the first: a case that never closed, a question that never got resolved, a son and brother killed doing the very thing he had taught Nadia to do, which was to sing out loud and unafraid.
Legacy¶
Damián’s death reshaped the people he left. His mother’s singing carried him afterward; his father grew quieter; and Nadia and Jaz learned young that loving people was dangerous and worth it anyway. For Nadia, the loss became foundational. It gave her the protective caution around vulnerability that defined her early adulthood, the fierce maternal vigilance she would later bring to her own son Raffie, and the immediate recognition of grief in Ezra Cruz when she first heard him—two wounded artists who knew the same loss in each other on sight.
Because Damián had been openly queer and may have died for it, his death also gave Nadia a personal stake in the queerness-under-threat that ran through Ezra’s world and the band’s chosen family. She understood, in her own body, what was at risk, and that understanding was part of why she folded so completely into that family.
Raffie, born in 2035, grew up knowing the uncle he would never meet—the great-uncle of the Beckford-Peralta line carried forward in the family’s stories and in his mother’s voice.