Nadine Davis-Russell: 62-Year-Old Grandmother Shot Dead in Staten Island

Nadine Davis-Russell, 62, was found about 6 a.m. on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, by police officers in her Staten Island apartment with a gunshot wound to the head.

Nadine Davis-Russell, a 62-year-old beloved mother and grandmother in Staten Island, New York, was someone who told you how it was whether you like it or not.

“She spoke the truth,” her son, Geoffrey Mason Jr., told the Advance/SILive.com. Davis-Russell enjoyed her three sons, but she really had a good time with the younger ones in her family.

“The thing she enjoyed the most was spending time with her grandkids,” Mason, who has four children, was quoted as saying.

Another son, 36-year-old Darrell Mitchell, told The New York Daily News that Davis-Russell was someone who smiled through her pain. She not long ago broke her foot and had been hobbled ever since. She lost a son in childbirth in the 1980s, and another son was fatally shot in 2011, he said.

“Nobody had it tougher than her,” Mitchell told the newspaper. “She’s been in a dogfight her whole life and she made it look pretty. She could be going through something, but she wears it well.”

Davis-Russell was found about 6 a.m. on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, by police officers in her Park Hill apartment with a gunshot wound to the head, NYPD officials told local media. Also shot was a 43-year-old man, who was at the apartment. He was taken to a nearby hospital in stable condition, authorities said.

Mason said he was still looking for answers in the slaying of his mother, who had recently had a Ring security camera installed on her door. “I just spoke to her yesterday,’' he was quoted as saying. “If she had any problems, she knew she could always reach out.”

Mitchell told the Daily News that right after the shooting, he got a call from one of his mother’s neighbors, and he immediately checked the Ring camera.

“The door was cracked, the camera’s facing in,” he told the Daily News. “I looked and I see blood on the floor, like little drops of blood and I just started screaming on the Ring. ‘What’s going on? Please. I’m her son. That’s my mother! Is she okay?’ They just kept ignoring me. The police. For 20 minutes. Then they put a piece of tape over the camera so I couldn’t see what’s going on.”

Police officers said that the victim knew her attacker and that the slaying possibly occurred after a meeting between the two turned violent for reasons they still don’t know.

Talking to the Daily News, Mitchell said the night before the shooting, the man was at his mother’s apartment and that she called Mitchell to ask for help with CashApp.

“I don’t know the person,” Mitchell was quoted as saying. “I just know it was someone that she may have known at some point. I can’t even tell you why it happened. I just know that it had to have went left, went bad at a certain point — and she didn’t walk away with her life.”

Police have arrested 45-year-old Shaeem Chavis, charging him with murder, first-degree assault, criminal possession of a loaded firearm and other alleged crimes. Chavis is a convicted felon who was imprisoned in the 1990s for killing a livery driver, according to news reports.