12-year-old boy, 2 women killed in Pittsburgh's Homewood remembered in tearful vigil

Friends and family members gathered Monday night in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood to remember the 12-year-old youth football player the neighborhood knew as “Buddy Business.”

“He was the first up at the field and the last to leave,” said Mubarik Ismaeli, president of the Homewood football team, the Bulldawgs.

Denzel “Buddy” Nowlin Jr., 12, his mother, 28-year-old Nandi Fitzgerald, and Tatiana “Tay” Hill, 28, were found dead inside a Hamilton Avenue row house early Friday.

Police responded to reports of gunfire around 4 a.m. and found one of the women dead outside the home. The other woman and the child were found inside. All were pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

“A mother is gone. Two mothers gone. And a son. In our neighborhood,” Ismaeli said. “Look around us – we’re the only ones who are going to save us. The pastors, the preachers, these executives – they’re not here. I hate it. I hate this.”

Investigators have released little information about the killings, including any information on possible suspects.

Hundreds, including dozens of young children who cried and held each other, gathered at Homewood Field off of North Lang Avenue to hold a vigil for the mother and son and call for justice for the three victims.

Fitzgerald leaves behind two children, aged 6 and 1, friends and family said, and Hill leaves a 5-year-old and 7-year-old.

“Just when I thought I was alone – I can’t even tell everybody how amazed I am,” said Wanda Fitzgerald, Nandi Fitzgerald’s mother. “When this happened, I thought I was just by myself. This has got to be the hardest thing I got to go through.”

It is the second loss for her family in the past year. In June, one of Nandi Fitzgerald’s younger sons drowned in a hotel pool near Hershey Park.

“I’ll never be the same after what I witnessed. I tried everything I could to save my baby, but God had other plans,” she wrote on a GoFundMe page at the time. “I turned my back (and) my 6-year-old baby was drowning.”

Wanda Fitzgerald said her daughter continued to grieve for 6-year-old Norez.

“She called me Dec. 24 and said, ‘Mom, I want my baby,’” she said. “I said, ‘Cry, baby, cry baby.’ But now I know you’re with your baby.”