‘I cannot move on.’
Eleven years later, the final footprints of 2-year-old Nyia Page still exact a heavy toll
Tiny footprints in snow led police to her body. In early 2007, police searched Braddock and Rankin for Nyia Page, a little girl one month shy of her second birthday whose parents said she went missing on the night of Feb. 2.
On Feb. 4, a county police officer near the Braddock-Rankin border scaled crumbling concrete steps from Pattison Avenue and followed a path connecting to the Hawkins Village public housing complex. On either side of the trail was thick brush and dark woods. In a small, snow-covered clearing, the officer saw the footprints, and Nyia’s frozen, mostly-unclothed body.
Eleven years later — Nyia would have turned 13 on March 11 — those footprints and everything they represent continue tohaunt these communities.
“She was conscious when she was left there,” said Braddock Mayor John Fetterman, who has Nyia’s suspected date of death, Feb. 3, 2007, tattooed on his arm. “It was bitter cold, like four degrees out that night. Afterwards, I remember taking off my shoes and socks one night and I walked around in my yard, you know, in bare feet just to, I don’t know … just to try to — to understand how awful, howawful that must have been …”
Nyia Page lived briefly and died horrifically. And in her absence exists a solar system of people revolving around her memory, including her mother, who cannot separate the good memories from the bad, and others who did not
know her but whose lives were fundamentally altered by a little girl’s lonely death.
“Can you imagine walking by a playground, and some of the girls resemble your girl, and you hear, ‘Mommy’ and you turn around?” said Darlene Scott, Nyia’s mother, who now lives in Duquesne. “I still have visions. I can see my girl to this day. I can hear her. I can still smell her.
“I cannot move on. I’m physically, emotionally damaged.” The details are stark. William Page, Nyia’s father, sexually assaulted her inside the family’s home on First Street in Braddock. In the dark of night, he took his shoeless and pants-less daughter from the house and put her in a hole near train tracks just north of the house, police said.
But Nyia was a “fighter,” Rankin Police Chief Ryan Wooten said, and she wouldn’t stop crying. So Page had to carry her several blocks to a wooded area where no one would hear. He left her and walked home, where Page would later watch searchers from an upstairs window, Chief Wooten said.
After police found her body face down in the snow, Page confessed. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder but was split on the death penalty. He was sentenced to life without parole.
“Every cop has that one case they can’t shake,” Chief Wooten said recently in his office, where newspaper clippings about Nyia are pinned to a bulletin board. “This is mine.”
Chief Wooten got into his police SUV and drove to where they found her. Police and volunteers cut down trees at the site and built a small memorial. They pressed molds of her feet from the coroner’s office into freshly-poured concrete: Nyia’s final steps, set in stone.
“When I was (an officer) in Pittsburgh, we had 27 homicides in 29 days one month, and I could still go home and live a normal life,” Chief Wooten said. “But this one -- when you find someone that small, that fragile, who hadn’t even started her life … you can’t shake that.” Neither can Nyia’s family. Every March 11, they celebrate her birthday. They buy cake and ice cream and try to focus on her life rather than her death.
“I remember what she smelled like: birthday cake and baby lotion,” Mrs. Scott said. “I remember her smile. I remember her first words: ‘mama, daddy, money’ … She used to walk around and sing ‘I’m a Little Tea Pot.’ She was a happy little girl.”
As Mrs. Scott spoke, her son, Xaviar, Nyia’s big brother, sat silently nearby.
The then-6-year-old boy helped lead police to his father.
“He’s on medications, he suffers from anxiety, depression, nightmares, day visions — and that’s 11 years later,” Mrs. Scott said. “He has questions: Why can’t his sister be here? Why did his father do that? Is he going to be like his daddy?What can I say?”
Xaviar, now 17, declined to speak.
“It doesn’t get better becausewe bring out the candles and celebrate her life,” Mrs. Scott said. “We still have to wakeup on March 12.”
In Braddock, Mr. Fetterman and his wife, Gisele, have done what they can to celebrate Nyia. They renamed the community center after her, and when they discovered last year that Nyia was buried in an unmarked grave because her family could not afford a headstone, Mr. Fetterman paid for one through his nonprofit.
Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, reads the headstone in Fairview Cemetery in McKeesport.
“Being the father of three children, that level of cruelty is unimaginable to me,” Mr. Fetterman said.
Back at the memorial, Chief Wooten said this case was personal because he and his exwife lost two babies in utero. Children’s welfare became his priority, he said, a calling of which he is reminded daily when he places sonogram imagesof his lost babies inside his bullet proof vest.
“This whole area came out looking for this kid,” he said, gesturing to the neighborhood.
He paused, then added: “She never had an opportunity to show the world who she could be.”
Chief Wooten leaves solar lamps in the memorial to give Nyia light in darkness. Nyia’s grandmother once drove by and saw the light and was thankful for it; others, including officers on patrol, have been spooked by the light. They think it’s her ghost, Chief Wooten said.
There is nothing positive to glean from Nyia’s death, the chief said. It reveals nothing but humanity at its very worst.
Moments later, however, he got a different perspective from a woman who lives near the memorial, who explained that she hangs wind chimes there so Nyia can listen to something pretty.
“Hersoul is here,” said Elizabeth Matthews, 53, of Braddock. “This is where she left, so I believe she’s still here. I’m trying to erase the bad memories so Nyia can have good memories,t oo.”
Chief Wooten stared off intothe distance.
Here called an old man who used to live in Braddock named Joe, who would push his lawnmower up the street to cut the grass at the memorial. The chief asked him why he did it, and the old man told him he could hear Nyia — that he could literally hear her voice —- begging him to make herworld beautiful again.
Sohe tried.