‘A GENTLE, SWEET SOUL’
Grandmother mourns Bridgeport’s 18th homicide of the year
BRIDGEPORT — Jackie Scott said she has consoled a number of families who have lost loved ones to gun violence.
And yet those experiences still did not prepare her for the grief she feels over her 21-year-old grandson, Nyair Nixon, who died early Sunday after being shot inside the Keystone social club, then stumbling outside, only to be hit in front of that East End business by a fleeing vehicle.
“I’m holding on the best I can,” Scott, 63, said Tuesday. “Now that I’m experiencing it on a personal level, I now know what they were going through. ... Oh, my poor baby is gone. Every morning I wake up and say, ‘Lord, I hope this is a dream.’ But it’s not. It’s not.”
Nixon was rushed to Bridgeport Hospital where, Scott said, staff tried hard but were unable to save him.
“They came to us and said, ‘He’s still alive. We have a pulse. We’re going to do all we can do,’ ” Nixon
recalled. “After two-and-a-half hours they came back and said, ‘I’m sorry, we did all we could.’ ”
“My grandson,” Scott continued with a deep sigh, “was such a well-rounded young man. He was smart. He was funny. Oh, I can’t begin to tell you.”
But she tried, wanting the public to know more about Nixon than his being a statistic — the city’s 18th homicide of the year.
Like that he was “a gentle, sweet soul.”
And that he had a passion for reptiles, had owned some as pets, including a lizard named “Iggy,” and had for years hoped to pursue a career studying them.
“It’s called a herpetologist, I believe,” Scott said. “He wanted to be a veterinarian, but it was to lizards and things like that.”
Scott said Nixon graduated from the Fairchild Wheeler Fairchild Interdistrict Multi-Magnet High School’s biotechnology research and zoological sciences program and attended the University of Hartford for one semester.
Nixon had been living in Bridgeport’s South End with his mother, Nicole Tate, and two younger sisters, a 13-year-old and a 1-year-old. Scott said her grandson was unemployed but “looking into (driving) tractor trailers. He was looking to get out of Bridgeport. He wanted to go back to school.”
Scott added: “He was just in Atlanta last week to visit a sister of his and she said he wanted to stay there.”
What makes Nixon’s death that much more difficult for his family, Scott said, is that he survived being shot about five years ago. She recalled it was a drive-by incident by an unknown assailant that occurred when Nixon was visiting and playing basketball with friends at the Charles F. Greene public housing development. A handful of boys were wounded.
One bullet entered Nixon’s stomach and “was still lodged in his hip,” Scott said. “But you’d never know it was still there.”
The emotional trauma, however, lingered.
“His whole demeanor changed,” Scott said. She recalled that Nixon became “so serious about life” and was sometimes afraid to socialize in crowds. So she was surprised he was at Keystone.
“Somebody shot him and he didn’t know who it was and he used to tell me all the time, ‘Grandma, I can’t be out there like that. If they shot me and didn’t finish the job, I’m a mark,’ ” Nixon said.
Teresa Wilson agreed that when Nixon was shot at Greene Homes it did make him more fearful and may even have impacted his college ambitions.
Wilson, executive director of The Village Initiative Project, which for nearly three decades has run a college preparation and college tour program for students, knew Nixon well. He had participated in that college initiative during high school and also more recently worked for Wilson assisting kindergarten through fourth-grade students with homework and other activities.
“I don’t even think special can describe him,” Wilson said Tuesday. “He was more than special.”
Wilson believed Nyair “should have been a lawyer. ... His mind was brilliant beyond his years. He was so intelligent. It had a lot to do with his family and how close knit they are and how they kept him engaged in positive activities even though he was surrounded with so much negativity in this city.”
“His mother Nicole made sure he stayed in our program,” Wilson said. “We would literally follow up with him, chase him down, to let him know he was loved and we wanted to keep our hands on him.”
Wilson and Scott said a large group of Nixon’s friends gathered at Seaside Park Monday and released balloons in his memory.
“He had a lot of friends that are really hurting right now,” Wilson said. “It was like a reunion for me for a lot of my students from those years when Nyair was in (the college preparation program).”
And, she added, all of them remembered Nixon as one of “the good ones.”
“I’m proud to say he’s never been arrested. He wasn’t in a gang,” Scott said. “He had no enemies, and if he did we knew nothing about it.”
“I just can’t believe it,” Scott concluded. “I’m just devastated. I’m hurt. I’m a grandmother. I should not be burying my grandson.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, no arrest had been made and police have asked anyone with information about the Barnum Avenue incident to contact Detective Robert Winkler at 203-581-5224 or call the Bridgeport Police Tips Line at 203-576-TIPS.