Family of woman allegedly killed by her ex-boyfriend wasn’t sure how to help her
When Marquis Mitchell looks at photos of his older sister Quanisha “Nisha” Burruss, he smiles as he sees a fun, at times goofy young woman with big dreams who loved her kids more than anything.
But the pictures are also painful for what they don’t show — the domestic abuse Burruss endured for years and the question that still torments Mitchell and other loved ones: Could they have done more to help her?
“I wish I had interfered with my own damn sister’s relationship, to the point where she would have gotten mad, but I would have saved her,” he said.
“I wish I had interfered with my own damn sister’s relationship, to the point where she would have gotten mad, but I would have saved her.” Marquis Mitchell, brother of Quanisha “Nisha” Burruss
Burruss, 38, of Middletown, was fatally stabbed in June 2020, allegedly by her ex-partner and the father of her two sons, William Bigaud Jr., with whom she had been in a troubled relationship since she was a teenager, according to authorities. Bigaud has pleaded not guilty in the still-pending case, which is scheduled for a pretrial hearing in late January. His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Shanay Fulton, Burruss’ neighbor and friend, said looking back there were so many signs of alleged abuse and control, but nobody knew the whole story.
Burruss and Bigaud met when she was about 20 years old and he was about 19. They both lived in New Haven and not long afterward had their first son together. Mitchell said he always remembered them arguing, but it wasn’t until he was older that he learned of any alleged physical abuse.
In 2017, Burruss signed a lease on an apartment in Middletown, Mitchell said, when she started her job there as a certified nursing assistant in addition to selling a line of lip glosses and other cosmetics.
She had planned, originally, to live there with her cousin, Mitchell said. But her cousin, who Mitchell said was struggling with his own experience with domestic abuse, backed out of the arrangement. Burruss ended up moving in by herself.
Once in Middletown, Burruss did not want to return to New Haven where she was originally from because of crime in the neighborhoods. Bigaud would visit her in Middletown, and he tried to keep her close, Mitchell said.
“He would tell her ‘your family don’t care about you,’ and I’d be like ‘why is he saying that,’ and she didn’t know,” Mitchell said. “She’d say ‘I aint worried about Junior (Bigaud)’ but I knew something wasn’t right.”
Mitchell said he knew Bigaud for years. They had both grown up in New Haven. They smoked weed and, according to Mitchell, Bigaud gave Mitchell PCP to take together.
Mitchell saw his sister and Bigaud fight a lot and tried to intervene, but he was no match for Bigaud. Bigaud, who was older than Mitchell, once left Mitchell with a large knot on his head from hitting him, Mitchell said.
Bigaud was violent with Burruss’ cousins, too, Mitchell said, but it became normalized for many of his friends and family.
When Burruss would tell her brother about Bigaud’s physical violence with her, Mitchell said he and his other family members wanted to get back at him for it. But his sister also downplayed Bigaud’s actions, Mitchell said.
“He’s very smart. He was manipulative, and my father never liked him,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell said he has known a lot of friends who have experienced abusive relationships. In other cases, he said he got in the middle of things to help them out. He regrets not helping his sister in the same way.
“I wish we would have said ‘he had to go.’ I wish we would have said that as a family,” Mitchell said.
Fulton said she never saw Bigaud act out. But whenever Fulton’s son went to play with Burruss’ children and Bigaud was around, Burruss’ older son would take them out to the store or to the park, Fulton said.
“My son told me he didn't want to go over there when their dad was there — he felt it,” Fulton said.
Fulton said she, too, suffered from abuse from an ex. She recalled riding the bus with Burruss and telling Burruss about her abusive ex. Burruss downplayed the incidents between her and Bigaud.
“She would say ‘he ain’t that crazy’ when I would tell her about my situation, and she said he (Bigaud) would never do anything that bad, but I said ‘never say never, girl,’” Fulton said. “She was always blowing it off even though she’d seen him do crazy things.”
Fulton said Burruss’ circumstances and hers were similar. They were both Black women living in the same apartment complex in Middletown, suffering abuse from the fathers of their children. They had been in the same shelter, their kids played together. They rode the bus together. But Burruss’ story ended differently, and Fulton still wonders why.
“(Her death), it made me really emotional because that could have been me,” she said.
Data shows that Black and Hispanic women are vastly overrepresented in intimate partner violence situations.
According to the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “African American females experience intimate partner violence at a rate 35 percent higher than that of white females” and approximately two-and-ahalf times the rate of women of other races. Among Hispanic women, 23.4 percent report being victimized by intimate partner violence.
Just the week before Burruss died, she was telling Fulton how proud she was of her for surviving the abuse, Fulton said.
“I think she was trying to tell me but did not want to speak about it,” Fulton said. “I think women do not want to speak about it. We normalize it and say that’s just how men are. I’m not knocking Nisha because I understand it. I went through it. And a lot of people also don’t have the mental capacity to think about what they (abusers) are doing to you, and you’re drained.”
Leading up to Burruss’ murder, Bigaud had brushes with the law. In 2012, Bigaud was convicted of breach of peace in New Haven, court records show. In 2020 he was convicted of criminal mischief and trespass in Meriden.
He was also arrested in New York as a murder suspect in 2013, but later acquitted after spending three years in jail, according to a report by the New York Daily News.
It was after his acquittal and release from custody in 2016 that Mitchell said he believed Bigaud changed. Bigaud was suspicious of Burruss and if she was seeing someone else while he was in jail, according to Mitchell. Bigaud made her give her phone to him.
The morning Burruss was killed, she heard a knock at the door of her Middletown apartment and told her youngest son not to open it, according to police records. Bigaud tried the door, but it was locked, so he climbed through a window to get inside, according to his arrest warrant.
Once inside, a conversation between Bigaud and Burruss in the kitchen erupted into violence when Bigaud began slashing Burruss with a knife he picked up in the apartment, police records allege. Their oldest son, who had just walked into the kitchen, witnessed the attack, according to Bigaud’s arrest warrant.
Her sons ran from the apartment, one of them dodging Bigaud’s attempt to grab them, the warrant said.
Mitchell said she did everything she could to protect her children throughout their lives. “She loved her kids the most,” Mitchell said. “She’d suffer before she let her kids suffer.”
Her younger son told police he saw his mother come out of their apartment. She yelled for someone to call 911, police records say. Then she walked back inside and fell to the floor.
Paramedics tried to revive Burruss, but she was pronounced dead at Middlesex Hospital later that morning. She had been stabbed near her heart and cut above her eye, according to paramedics. Bigaud fled the scene, but police arrested him a few days later in Georgia.
“He took a lot from us when he did that,” Mitchell said. “My sister was real. That’s one thing I always loved about her, and I miss that, because I could talk to her about anything.”