‘PROUD TO BE HER SON’
At her funeral, he recalls mom found dead in a duffel bag
For 22 years, a woman who was recently found slain in a duffel bag in her Manhattan apartment got up early on each of her son’s birthdays to fill a room with helium balloons before he woke.
“Mama would wake up at 5 in the morning every single birthday and quietly fill my room up [with] balloons. Last year was the first year she didn’t do it,” Michael Medvedev said of his late mother, Nadia Vitels, at her funeral Monday on Long Island.
Vitels, 52, was mourned in a service in Hebrew and English at Gutterman’s Funeral Home in Woodbury.
“I remember she showed me a gold medal she had earned in high school back in Russia, a student medal of honor for being top in her class. That medal, for some reason, has always stuck with me. It made me feel proud to be her son, and I wanted to earn my gold medals to live up to her,” said Medvedev.
Vitels was discovered about 4:30 p.m. on Thursday after concerned family members went to check on her when they didn’t hear from her for several days. They headed to the unit she’d moved into only two days before on E. 31st St. near Third Ave. in Kips Bay, according to cops and sources.
“[One of the in-laws] immediately pointed to the closet and said, ‘Can you please open this bag? I believe that there’s a body in there,’” said building superintendent Jean Pompee.
“I didn’t know when he had a chance to look, but that’s the first thing he did,” the super recalled. “One of the firemen came and pulled the clothes off, and there was the duffel bag and he opened it. And he said that there’s a body in there.”
At the Monday funeral, Medvedev recounted how his mother adopted a puppy from Chicago and had him go fly to pick up the animal while she was tending to her sick parents.
“He became her next obsession, her best friend, her man. He was the only man she needed,” the son said of the beloved pet.
“This little puppy gave her the love she needed to get through the hardest time in her life,” added Medvedev, recalling how his maternal grandparents died a few months apart last year.
When Pompee and the family members checked on Vitels, her beloved dog had been left behind, a sign to the super that something was amiss.
“When I opened the door, the dog was there, [and] the dog was alone,” Pompee told the Daily News. “She wouldn’t have left the dog all alone.”
At her funeral, her son gave an account of his mother’s colorful, adventurous life.
Vitels grew up in Moscow and moved to Stillwater, Okla., on her own with her tennis rackets to attend college, according to Medvedev. She interviewed with the CIA, said her son, meeting with the agency three times.
“Beautiful, young, smart, Russian — she was the perfect candidate,” he said.
Instead, Vitels went to Miami and attended graduate school, eventually landing a job as a marketer for a nonprofit and later working for camera company Canon and cell phone giant Nokia. She later ran Sugarpova, tennis star Maria Sharapova’s candy line.
Pavel Medvedev, Vitels’ ex-husband, also remembered her as a singular force at her funeral.
“For me it was love from the first sight. The moment I saw her I knew she would be my wife and we would have kids,” he said. “She was the reason I left Russia, changed my life, traveled across the world just to be with her to start my life in New York.”
An autopsy revealed Vitels died from blunt-force trauma to the head, the city medical examiner said Friday, ruling her death a homicide.
Detectives are zeroing in on two persons of interest in the death, police sources said Saturday. A man and a woman were caught on video leaving the apartment around the time investigators believe she died, according to sources.
With her son grown and her parents deceased, Vitels was entering a new era in her life, Michael Medvedev said at the service. “Getting ready to move to New York City where she would conquer the world,” he remarked. “She was so excited to move into the city.”