Susanna Nolt grew up in Ephrata, the eighth in a family of 12 kids. They were Old Order Mennonites and lived similarly to the Amish, though Nolt said her community pushed back against the comparison: “Our buggies are black! The Amish buggies are gray!”
There weren’t arranged marriages, but Nolt knew what was expected: Around age 18, she could begin dating a young man who was baptized in the Church. After marrying, she would raise her own large family within the Old Order Mennonite community, just as her parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had done. A family tree Nolt made when she was 16 went 14 generations back, featuring almost all Mennonites.
When Nolt was 27, she had what she described as a “spiritual rebirth” and decided to leave. She was excommunicated and kicked out of her family’s home.
Nolt checks out her Christmas “ugly sweater” before the event.
After a few years of living in Lancaster and nannying in Reading, she moved to Roxborough.
Now 39, Nolt works as a nanny, drives for Lyft, and is earning an online master’s degree in art education from Liberty University. She lives by herself, and is figuring out what romantic partnership might look like in her new future.
The following, as told to Zoe Greenberg, has been edited for length and clarity.
On growing up in a different world
We knew the Church’s rules better than we knew the Bible. They were read to us every half year, the day before Communion: how long the dresses need to be, how big the head coverings need to be.
You didn’t have to work hard to make friends. You had your neighbors, the girls from church. You would go to school in the one-room classroom. We only went till eighth grade; we were prohibited from going to high school or college.
The earliest photo that Nolt has of herself is this newspaper clipping that shows her working at Uncle Henry’s Pretzel Bakery in Mohnton, Pa., when she was 19.
My mom was, obviously, a stay-at-home mom. We did all our cooking, canning, freezing, sewing, baking, gardening ourselves. So that was a full-time job for a mom. We had a ginormous garden.
My dad was a leather worker. He made harness parts for the horses. He was a deacon in the Church, so he was sometimes pretty busy with that, which made our income especially low, because positions in the Church do not pay.
On Sunday nights in the ‘dating parlor’
Young people were pretty much allowed to choose who they wanted to date, with the expectation that you date only someone who’s a baptized member of the Church, to ensure that you can build a good Mennonite family.
We had Sunday night dates, usually five-hour dates at the girls’ homes.
The house was very plain, no pictures. We had a dating parlor — it was the most decorated room of the house. The girls’ boyfriends would come over around seven o’clock on Sundays and stay ‘till 11 or 12.
The couple would sit on the couch and chat. Sometimes younger siblings would go in and play board games with them, or we’d play yard games like croquet or volleyball. Sometimes they would go on a walk in the woods. But most of the time they would spend in the parlor, getting to know each other and discussing their future.
Nolt had never been to a speed dating event before but wanted to try it.
On ‘courting buggies’ and Rumspringa
Sometimes the boys liked to decorate their buggies, to make them courting buggies. They would have a fancy varnished cabinet in the front, and maybe some dice or feathers hanging, and a nice afghan blanket or some kind of throw over the feet, because they wanted to impress their girls. They’d put reflectors on the buggy and some stripes, usually coordinating with the interior of the buggy.
In the outside world, I’ve learned they see Rumspringa as this year where you go out and experiment with the outside world, but that’s not really what it was to us. Rumspringa was just youth group, hanging out with our friends from church on Saturday nights.
Often it was hymn singing, and then afterward we would have a snack and play volleyball. There was usually a dance. We weren’t allowed to listen to music, so the dance itself was often kind of boring, because dance and music kind of need each other.
Nolt consulted her friend on which earrings she should wear.
I didn’t date much. In my time, guys didn’t really ask as easily, and the girls had no way of playing into it. You just had to wait until a guy would ask you. That felt very constricting to me.
Only about 50% of my friends were dating, if that. My mom especially, she had no problem with me being single.
Our weddings would happen on Tuesdays or Thursdays at the bride’s house. The bride’s family was responsible for hosting the wedding, which was all day: eight o’clock in the morning to at least eight o’clock at night. I never knew weddings were that expensive, because the family just provided it.
On choosing to leave
Ever since I was 10 years old, I had questions. I wouldn’t ask my questions, because that would make you a troublemaker. Ironically, I was afraid that our rules weren’t strict enough. For example, we weren’t allowed to have cameras or pictures because that was considered a graven image or an idol. I always loved playing with dolls, and I started thinking, “Maybe dolls are graven images or idols.” And I became so obsessed and bothered.
I tried to settle down by getting baptized at 17. But I felt like something wasn’t right, something was missing.
Then, when I was 27, I was teaching out in Kansas for a completely different set of Mennonites. I started realizing that bringing my rules to their community did not help anything. Like, nobody wants more rules.
I had this moment of rebirth in which I realized that Jesus is not the same as being Mennonite and all these rules really have nothing to do with Jesus.
At first I kept it to myself. I didn’t actually get excommunicated and kicked out of my parents’ house until soon after I was 28.
On losing everything
I learned that leaving is a much, much bigger deal than I ever realized, because those relationships were basically severed. I lost all my friends. I lost everything I had ever known. I had no idea how to drive a car. When I finally was able to get a car, it was like, No, you can’t drive it, you have to get a title, you have to get it notarized, you have to get insurance.
In my experience, you just get a horse and a buggy and you go drive.
A year or two after I left, my mom said that they’d been talking about it, and they decided they still want to be family. I’m still seen as the black sheep, but basically if they invite the family, they’re going to invite me. I can visit them, but of course I have to wear a long skirt or dress.
It doesn’t feel like family. It’s kind of this emotional distance.
On assimilating to the ‘English’ world
I had been nannying and I was looking for my next position and all the good ones were in Philadelphia. I moved to Philly, not knowing anyone.
I have to learn how normal people think. I grew up with no music, no media, no TV. A lot of conversations make all kinds of references to singers, actors, movies, shows. It’s a lot of researching all the time to understand what people are talking about.
I was enjoying Christian music already and I wanted to branch out, but found it difficult to connect with the music since it was overwhelmingly new. I could never recognize songs playing in public areas — it just sounded like noise. Until one day I did recognize a song and I felt so connected and happy I got tears.
Nolt in her home in Roxborough, where she lives alone.
So one of the guys I dated would send me playlists of 12 songs every time I requested a new list. I specifically asked to focus on songs that you hear in restaurants, malls, offices, etc. He would send me a list and I listened until I was familiar with each song.
My previous employer composed a list of 50 classic movies from the ‘70s to the current day so I could watch and slowly begin to catch on to references. Over the holidays that year when I was lonely, I binge-watched all those movies.
I found acquaintances in Philly who taught me about football, patiently explaining how the game works. I’ve become an Eagles fan.
On dating and ghosting
Most of the people I dated, I met online. I’ve used Upward, which is a Christian dating app; I’ve used Match. Even though I’m 39, in many ways, I’m just starting my life.
There was a guy who was in the film business, and I said, “I grew up without any of this, and so I’ve always been curious, how do they create this effect?” He got so freaked out that that was my background, and he sent me a long text afterward like, “I think you’re a really wonderful girl, but we’re just not compatible.” And he quickly blocked me.
Dating is much more inconsistent than dating in the Old Order Mennonite community. You think you’re dating them, and then all of a sudden they’re like, “Oh, never mind.”
I don’t expect perfectly scheduled dates like we had back there, but just some sense of consistency.
Nolt headed to the church where the speed dating event was held.
There’s some pretty serious genetic diseases among my people because the gene pool is so small, so I’m really not interested in dating someone from my background. Another reason I’m not interested is that many of them do not really assimilate to the extent that I have.
I’ve taken a number of the people I’ve dated out to Lancaster. They met my parents, and some of them did really well. Others were more just glad when it was over.
I don’t hide my background, because it’s part of who I am. Sometimes I wish it wasn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is.
If I have a long-term committed relationship, I’m going to need to have someone who can be OK with that.
This is the first in an occasional series about life partners across the Philadelphia area. If you want to share your story about who you’re navigating life with romantically, write to lifepartners@inquirer.com. We won’t publish anything without speaking to you first.
BRANDYWINE, Md. — No one knows exactly when Terrence Butler began keeping a journal, but there is a best guess. The first and only time someone noticed that he was writing something that he clearly wanted to keep private was the evening of Saturday, July 29, 2023, four days before he died.
He had spent that morning and afternoon at his mother’s townhouse here, curling and bending his 6-foot-7 body to lounge on the couch, cozy in a hoodie, gym shorts, and white socks, quiet, sometimes reading his Bible. His behavior was nothing out of the ordinary for whenever he was in town, though there was something about her son’s visit, this particular visit, that Dena Butler thought strange. Throughout Terrence’s two years at Drexel University, before and after he had stopped playing for the men’s basketball team, he merely had to call Dena whenever he had wanted to come home, and she would drive the 150 miles north to West Philadelphia to pick him up. This time, though, he had taken an Amtrak train from 30th Street Station, arriving in New Carrollton, Md., at close to 11 o’clock Friday night. He had never done that before.
His older sister Tiara was with him all day at Dena’s, happy to dote on her little brother, helping Dena prepare his favorite meals — bacon and eggs for breakfast; chicken fingers with his favorite condiment, Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce, for lunch — the two of them good-naturedly complaining that the Jamie Foxx movie they were watching was too slow and not all that funny.
It started to rain in the afternoon, and Terrence walked over to the wide window at the front of the house. He stood there for a while, leaning back a bit, his eyes turned to the charcoal clouds outside. Tiara remembers that moment still. “He loved the rain,” she said. “It wasn’t odd for him to do, but now, looking back on it, he was very somber, looking into the sky.”
A journal that belonged to Terrence Butler at his mother’s home reads, “I’m sorry. I really tried.”Some of Terrence Butler’s notes displayed at Dena Butler’s home in Brandywine, Md.
She drove Terrence back to their house; he would stay there that night, with Tiara and her husband, Arthur Goforth, to wake up for a 6:32 train back to Philadelphia the next morning. Before he went to bed, he sat on a barstool at Tiara and Arthur’s island, the farthest seat in their kitchen from their living room. In his hands were a black-ink pen and a notebook with a sky-blue cover.
Tiara assumed that he was finishing up some schoolwork. “After I got a little closer, he slowed down with the writing,” she said. “When I was further away, he was hunched over, writing.” She didn’t think anything of it until Wednesday, Aug. 2, when she and her family were combing through Apartment 208 of The Summit at University City, Terrence’s apartment, desperate for any clue that might tell them why he had shot himself.
Terrence Butler appeared in just eight games for the Drexel men’s basketball team over his two years at the university.
The story of a young life
Twelve photographs on a wall in Zach Spiker’s office at Drexel tell the story of his decade as the university’s men’s basketball coach. There was Matey Juric, the 5-11 backup guard who was an “empty-chair kid” when Spiker recruited him: “I went to watch him play, and there were four chairs for college coaches, and they were all empty.” He’s in medical school now. There were team photos from the Dragons’ recent trips to Australia and Italy, from their celebration of their 2021 Colonial Athletic Conference Tournament championship. And there — in the picture from Italy, blending in among his friends and teammates — was Terrence Butler. It’s the only photo on the wall that Spiker took himself.
“It’s there for a reason,” he said, “and it will be as long as I’m here.”
Terrence Butler’s college basketball career comprised just eight games over two seasons at Drexel. His death at age 21, on Aug. 2, 2023, was at once core-shaking to those who knew and cared for him and, after a few days, just another speck of troubling news during troubling times to those who did not. It marked one of the rare occasions in which someone, especially someone so young, had died by suicide and the manner of death was immediately acknowledged and publicly revealed.
Terrence Butler spent two seasons with the Drexel Dragons from 2021 to 2023.
Within 48 hours of the discovery of Terrence’s body, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health confirmed to media outlets that he had killed himself, for there was no way to euphemize it and no point in trying. The cold and clinical language of the medical report — that a “normally developed, well nourished … black man whose appearance is consistent with the reported age of 21 years” had died — left no space for doubt.
The reasons that Terrence had died … they were a different matter. They would remain shrouded in grief and incomprehension, in blindness born of love and admiration and disbelief that he was capable of such an act — in an innocent unwillingness or inability to see.
Like all those who die at their own hands, he was locked in battle with himself. It was a struggle whose scope and depth he alone knew, and only by tugging a thread of the tapestry of circumstances and events and achievements that were sewn together to form his too-brief life can anyone even attempt to make sense of its ending.
The gym at Bishop McNamara High School in Forestville, Md.
Why would anyone want to see the signs, after all? And who would have been capable of seeing them? Spiker couldn’t spot them on the day he met Terrence. No coach could. It was a camp at Drexel, just one stop on a tour of colleges and universities and programs for Terrence, and there he was, in the summer after his sophomore year at Bishop McNamara High School in Forestville, Md., grabbing a rebound in one pickup game inside the Daskalakis Athletic Center, scanning the court to throw an outlet pass, seeing no one open, pulling the ball down and dribbling the length of the floor to throw down a dunk himself. Spiker offered him a scholarship then and there. Take your tour. See those schools. Go through your process. Just remember: You have a home here at Drexel.
“We loved the skill set,” Spiker said. “We loved his motor, his size, typical basketball things. He was big. He was strong. He was respectful, a super-engaging, super-likable, smiling guy. Man, TB, he was a very impressive young man.”
Terrence’s parents, Tink and Dena, had charted a particular course for him and his sisters to try to prepare them for the demands and rewards of the pursuit. Tink saw sports as the children’s primary path. Growing up near Washington, D.C., he had boxed in the AAU and Golden Gloves programs before entering the Army, which promptly sent him to Colorado Springs to train to make the 1988 U.S. Olympic team as a light heavyweight.
“Was doing well,” he said. “Winning all my fights.”
Except he dislocated his left shoulder. No one knew; he popped it back in and hid the injury from the coaches, for a while. He started fighting southpaw, throwing all his real punches with his right hand, faking haymakers with his left … except the shoulder popped out again, and he couldn’t hide it any longer, and he had to have surgery, and his Olympic dream vanished. “I don’t know how far I could have gone,” he said one day in his living room. “I probably would have won a gold medal.”
Dysfunction framed Dena’s early life. She was 2 when her parents split up, both of them alcoholics, her mother moving from Memphis to the D.C. region to escape Dena’s father. Tall for her age, Dena began driving when she was 10 and working when she was 14, putting the money she earned from fast food restaurant and retail jobs toward rent.
“I didn’t sleep as a child,” she said. “I never slept. I just couldn’t. There was always something happening, and I just decided not to live like that when I had kids. I didn’t want that for them. These can be cycles if you’re not intentional and deliberate about your choices. Your choices affect your kids. Every choice my parents made affected me.”
Tasia (left), Dena, and Tiara Butler pose for a portrait in front of their family wall at Dena’s home in Brandywine, Md.
Once Dena and Tink met and got married and started their family, as he moved from one solid job to another — from a power-company technician to a crane operator to a D.C. government supervisor — and she settled in as a resources analyst for NASA, they established a certain culture, with certain norms and standards, for their children. There would be a consuming emphasis on academics and athletics and, more importantly to Dena, a balance of those two foci.
Tiara was born in 1992, and a second daughter, Tasia, arrived three years later, and the sisters grew up hearing the same daily phrases from Dena: TV will kill your brain. … Go look it up in the dictionary. … Smart people ask questions. … “But the biggest philosophy we learned,” Tasia said, “was ‘Work first so you can play later.’”
Dena Butler with her daughters, Tasia (left) and Tiara (right).
The playing came naturally to all of them. The only driving Tiara did when she was 10 was when she had a basketball in her hands and an open road to the hoop. She got her first Division I scholarship offer when she was 14, then picked Syracuse. Tasia preferred dancing — hip-hop, ballet, tap, jazz — to dribbling, but she followed Tiara to Syracuse on a full ride for basketball before transferring to James Madison.
The understanding that sports could be a vessel shepherding the two of them to college, to a terrific education, to stability and success in their lives was doctrinal among mother, father, and daughters. Family time morphed into basketball time, and basketball time morphed into vacation time, and there was less vacation time as life went on.
Tink, in fact, spent so many mornings and afternoons and nights in gymnasiums and arenas with Tiara and Tasia, became so familiar a presence at AAU tournaments and all-star camps, chatted with so many coaches and recruiters and shared so many tidbits and observations about players that he parlayed his daughters’ careers into a new profession. Into a scouting service. Into a subscription-based website: prepgirlshoops.com. Into more than $100,000 in annual revenue. After Terrence was born in 2002, he was a fixture in those gyms and near those courts just like his parents and sisters were.
“When he first started playing,” Tiara said, “he would run up and down the court, saying, ‘Look at me,’ smiling and leaping. Always passed the ball. So kind to teammates and opponents. He really just wanted the snacks afterward.”
He wanted to be “T.J.,” but it never stuck. His sisters shortened the nickname they had given him when he was a baby, “Man-Man,” to just “Man.” It was all they called him. By age 10, he was playing high-level AAU ball, growing on a vegetable-free diet of chicken nuggets and french fries. Heredity was on his side. Tink was 6-3. Dena was 5-10. “I’m thinking he’s going to be 6-6 or 6-7,” Tink said, “and Michael Jordan was 6-6.”
Tink took him to one football practice when Terrence was 11, to try to toughen him up. All it took was a helmet to the stomach in his first tackling drill to get him coughing and wheezing and whining, to have him decide he hated football. Good, Tink thought, now we can concentrate fully on basketball. So Tiara and Tasia — don’t let those soft features and sad eyes, just like their brother’s, fool you — would roughhouse Terrence in their one-on-one games.
“May have gotten carried away,” Tasia said.
Tiara Butler, a visual arts teacher at Bishop McNamara High School, wears a T-shirt in remembrance of her brother, Terrence, at the school in Forestville, Md.
‘We were a unit’
His sisters’ recruiting visits were groundwork-layers for him, at least in his father’s eyes. When he was 9, he got pulled out of the crowd at a Towson University game for a free-throw contest. He sank 12 straight, right in front of the cheerleaders. When he was in sixth grade, the family joined Tasia for a visit to the University of Miami, and men’s coach Jim Larrañaga took one look at Terrence, at a pair of prepubescent arms already showing muscle and definition, and said, I’m giving you an offer!
He did the AAU circuit: DC Thunder, DC Premier, Team Takeover, Team Durant. Tink would bounce from Tiara’s game to Tasia’s to Terrence’s; Dena was always at Terrence’s. So he’d call her for updates.
How’s he doing?
OK … Oh, wait. He just scored.
A necklace features charms with photographs of Terrence Butler and his grandmother, Connie S. Hill, at Dena Butler’s home.
As the kids’ basketball schedules, especially Terrence’s, took up more days on the calendar, there were more dinners in restaurants, fewer at home around the table. But Tink and Dena still made time to serve in ministry at The Soul Factory, an evangelical church in Largo, Md., even serving as premarital counselors to engaged couples. “We were always on the road,” she said, “but we lived selflessly. We were a unit.”
Then, a potential setback: July 2016. The summer between his seventh- and eighth-grade years. An AAU tournament in Atlanta. He jumped, landed on someone’s foot, wrenched his right knee. A torn meniscus. Surgery. Nine months of rehabilitation.
Tink Butler with framed jerseys honoring his son, Terrence, in Clinton, Md.
The big private high schools in and around D.C. had been scouting him; the injury might scare them away. No. Bishop McNamara, just a five-minute drive from the Butlers’ house, followed through with a basketball scholarship. Affiliated with the Congregation of the Holy Cross, its campus a strip of gleaming modern architecture and emerald land in Prince George’s County, with an enrollment that its admissions officers limit to roughly 900 students in grades nine through 12, McNamara is one of the most respected high schools in Maryland. Its alumni include several professional athletes, an astronaut, and Jeff Kinney — the author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The school fit perfectly with Dena’s plan for her children, with the idea of segueing from sports to a career or vocation beyond sports.
In his first year at McNamara, Terrence was the only freshman to play varsity basketball. The following year, the school hired a new head coach, Keith Veney, who immediately made Terrence the centerpiece of the team. He called Terrence “T-Butts” and would push him to shoot more frequently, questioning him every time he passed the ball and ending up half-impressed and half-exasperated at the answer Terrence always gave: Because the guy was open, Coach.
Still, Terrence had the ball in his hands often enough to be named the Mustangs’ most valuable player as a sophomore. “He would pass up those shots on purpose,” Tink said, “so that it wouldn’t be about him. He liked the accolades, but he didn’t want the attention.”
What did he want? It was hard to know sometimes. From the time Terrence began playing, Tink would give him a dollar for every rebound he grabbed in a game. One day, he opened up Terrence’s bank and found $1,200. Other than the occasional game of Fortnite, the kid didn’t buy anything for himself, didn’t crave the trendy clothes or the coolest sneakers. “He was the banker,” Tasia said. “We’d ask him, ‘You have change for a $50?’”
He embraced McNamara’s dress code: shirt, tie, hair cropped close. At home, he’d sit down and read the Bible, watch CNN, make an offhand joke whenever Dena would wonder how he had done on a school assignment. Got an A. Could’ve gotten an A+ if I tried. He had one girlfriend in high school, but Tink was pretty sure that Terrence hadn’t done much more with her than carry her books to class and sit with her on a stoop. “Waiting for marriage,” Tink said.
Terrence towered over the student body yet managed to keep himself on his peers’ level. “He was just a cool guy,” said Herman Gloster, McNamara’s dean of students. “You would see him before he’d see you. He was a kid who you could feel coming down the hallway — tall, always smiling. It was like a light force was behind him. Very respectful. Never had a detention. Just a great spirit. If you didn’t like Terrence Butler, something was wrong with you.”
A memorial card for Terrence Butler hangs on the wall in dean of students Herman Gloster’s office at Bishop McNamara High School in Forestville, Md.
When McNamara shut down its building for the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, it kept its doors closed and its students learning virtually for 12 months, from the middle of Terrence’s junior year to the middle of his senior year. The administration created “The Mustang Mix,” clusters of faculty and students who would gather on Zoom calls to stay connected with one another.
“A lot of people were complaining that seniors weren’t coming to the mixes,” said Dian Carter, McNamara’s principal. “Terrence came every day faithfully. He was always on camera, making breakfast, frying eggs.”
Once the school reopened, it did so partially. Students returned on a staggered schedule based on where their last names fell alphabetically. Plexiglas dividers separated them at each cafeteria lunch table. The entire building was cleaned every Wednesday. “It was the craziest thing,” Carter said, and she could sense Terrence’s hunger to be around and engage face-to-face with his friends and classmates again. Ms. Carter, he’d ask her, can’t we come here every day?
Terrence Butler was troubled by knee injuries throughout his time at Drexel.
Injury problems
The court was hardly a refuge for him. Throughout the first month of the lockdown, he and Tink searched for places where he could play and train. They found one guy who had a small private gym and was willing to open it. On a Sunday, Terrence was going full-court against some eighth and ninth graders, players younger and less skilled than he was, and one of them bumped into Terrence, and that brief contact was all it took. No, my knee! An MRI test confirmed it: He had retorn his right meniscus.
Another surgery, this one in April 2020. Another nine months without basketball. OK, Terrence could still be a McDonald’s All American nominee his senior year at McNamara … and was. Terrence could still be ready for the start of his freshman season at Drexel, and Spiker had remained loyal to him, had been the first coach to offer him a scholarship and had never rescinded it, had shown that he was authentic and real and that his word meant something. Terrence could still stand there inside the DAC in June 2021, alongside Drexel’s other incoming recruits, for a private ceremony honoring the Dragons’ conference-tournament title three months earlier, and he could hear Spiker say, I know you guys didn’t play in these games, but you’re part of this program. I’m super-excited you’re here to see this, and this is the standard we’re shooting for. Terrence could …
… no, maybe he couldn’t. During a workout just weeks after the ceremony, he tore his left meniscus — not as severe as his previous injuries, just a two-to-four-month rehab this time, but … Lord, three knee operations, and he hadn’t suited up for a single official practice for Spiker yet.
Terrence Butler cheering on his Drexel teammates during his time on the sideline.
Rough as that misfortune was, Dena trusted that her son could handle it. “It was almost like he was always doing a self-examination to see if something resonated with him,” she said. “He had a mentality of ‘I could take it or leave it. I’m good wherever I am. If I choose to go to school, I can do that. If I choose to play ball, I can do that. If I choose to write novels, I can do that.’ He was never a person you could put in some type of box. He was completely different. You could not read him in that manner. He was like, ‘Wherever God leads me.’ He would just be in that moment. If he’s playing ball, he’s going to give you ball. If he’s in school, he’s going to give you school.”
These were more than a proud mother’s words. Terrence wrote biblical verses in pencil on index cards and carried the cards with him. Galatians 5:16: So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves. There was no preaching or proselytizing, just the self-assurance of a person who appeared fully comfortable with himself. Is there a more appealing quality in a human being? It didn’t take him long to become one of the most popular figures on campus. He majored in engineering, joined Drexel’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and had the time and the opportunities to move within the university’s varied worlds.
Spiker would stop in at a coffee shop to grab a drink, and a student would recognize him and say, Coach, I know Terrence Butler. He’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. So Spiker would take a selfie with the student and text it to Terrence, and Terrence would respond, One fan at a time, Coach. One day, the two of them strolled across campus, and Spiker felt like he was with a celebrity.
“It was two girls from the lacrosse team: ‘Hey, TB,’” he said. “It was two girls from the dance team. It was two guys from FCA. A lot of people identified with him. He knew as many people as the rest of our team combined. This dude was very outgoing and had a big reach.”
Imagine if he had been playing any meaningful minutes for the Dragons. Imagine what his reach would have been then. He’d set the coaches’ grease board in his lap, pick up a marker, and design plays for his teammates. He’d call his brother-in-law, Arthur, who was a personal trainer, and press him for insights and advice: What can I do to be the best athlete I can be, to strengthen my body so I won’t get injured again? Push-ups, sit-ups, stretching — he devised his own exercise routines.
Luke House, one of Terrence’s teammates and roommates, would join him for long weightlifting sessions that they’d pause only when Terrence set his face in “The Look,” House once wrote, which meant “it was time to tuck our shirts in because the weights were getting heavy.”
After one victory over Towson, after Terrence had spent two days of practice dragging his damaged leg up and down the floor, refusing to sit out, insisting on suiting up for the Dragons’ scout team, Spiker turned to one of his assistant coaches and said, I don’t think we win that game if TB doesn’t give us all he had. He was doing his best to contribute, to get back on the court. Everyone could see that.
Then in January 2022 he was running during a pickup game and felt his right knee pop and found out that he had torn that damned right meniscus for a third time.
Terrence Butler’s Bishop McNamara High School basketball jersey is framed at his mother’s home.
The doctors and trainers recommended that he not play anymore. Tink called him. Did he want to transfer? Tink had been working the phones, talking to coaches in other programs. No, Terrence wanted to stay. Spiker and Drexel put him on a medical hardship scholarship. He could get his engineering degree, be part of the team in another role or capacity. I’m good, Dad, he said. I’m good.
Dena … well, it never crossed her mind that Terrence might transfer. She had attended all of his games at McNamara, and she attended every Drexel home game whether he played in any of them or not. And he would play just those eight times, never seeing the floor for more than 12 minutes in any of them, never pulling down more than five rebounds, never scoring more than two points. She attended every game even though she and Tink had been drifting from each other for a while, even though he was spending more time at work and at games — among Tiara and Tasia and Terrence and his scouting service and his tournaments and his website, where did business end and family begin? — even though they divorced in 2021.
It was raw. It was painful. It was the breakup of The Butlers — that’s how everyone knew them, spoke of them. The Butlers. They had been a unit, as Dena said, and now they weren’t.
Terrence was managing to handle it, as she trusted he would. At least he seemed to be managing. Spiker noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Still the same old TB. Still in good spirits. Still the same terrific student — he made the Colonial Athletic Association’s honor roll in 2022, the same year basketball stopped for him. In June 2023, he was taking a summer class, Introduction to Africana Studies, and earned an A on a five-page paper about the corrosive effects of American slavery. He wrote in part:
Dena Butler and Tiara Butler stand in front of the family wall.
The solution begins with education and must start at a young age. … Until we start to seek knowledge and dig up the roots of America rather than trimming branches, black people will always be disproportionately affected, with no understanding why.
A month and a half later, Terrence took that train ride down to Maryland to visit his family. Tink was hosting a party at his house on the night of Saturday, July 29, for a world welterweight championship bout between Errol Spence Jr. and Terence Crawford — 70 people, food, drinks, a television on the outside deck. Terrence declined to attend, which didn’t strike anyone as unusual. People would have asked him about Drexel and basketball, would have made a fuss over him, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be an object of attention at such a large gathering. He preferred a quiet night at his sister’s house. Arthur offered to cut his hair.
Just before Terrence and Tiara left Dena’s house, the three of them gathered on the front stoop to snap a photo of themselves in the summertime’s evening light. But as he stepped outside, Terrence paused. Hold on, he said. I forgot something. He went back inside, reemerging after a few moments. The picture, in hindsight, is telling. Dena is in the middle. She smiles wide, her teeth sparkling white. Tiara, on the left, has a knowing, closed-mouth grin. Terrence towers above them. His face is stone.
Tiara (left) with mom Dena and Terrence Butler.
He texted Dena at 9:19 a.m. Sunday to let her know that he had arrived safely. But on Wednesday, Aug. 2 — a cerulean, temperate, just perfect Aug. 2 in Philadelphia — Terrence missed a team breakfast. He was tracing a different academic arc from most of the other players, taking a full schedule of summer classes, on track to graduate in a year, while his teammates were taking a course or two. So Spiker chalked up his absence to his study habits, and it wasn’t until the guys started to murmur that they hadn’t seen him in a few days that Spiker began to wonder and worry.
He called and texted Terrence immediately. No response. He called Dena, who told him that she hadn’t heard from Terrence since he got back to Drexel. He called campus security and requested a wellness check and stayed on the phone while the officers unlocked and opened the door to Terrence’s bedroom and discovered that something horrible had happened.
When her phone buzzed and a police detective told her that her son was dead, Dena managed to ask, How? She listened to the answer, then ran upstairs. After she and Tink had divorced, she knew that she would be living alone, in a new house, in an unfamiliar neighborhood. So she had purchased a black .357 revolver for self-defense. All three of her children knew exactly where she kept the gun: out of sight, on the floor, under the headboard of her bed. She looked there. It was gone.
Photos of Terrence Butler on display at Dena Butler’s home in Brandywine, Md.
A terrible conundrum
At Terrence’s funeral, inside Zion Church in Greenbelt, Md., Tink and Dena stood side by side behind a lectern, holding hands, eulogizing their son. “I thank God for loaning him to us for 21 years,” Tink said during his short speech. Dian Carter, McNamara’s principal, had been on vacation, sunning herself on a beach near Houston, when she heard the news of Terrence’s death. No, she thought, that can’t be right. Terrence must have been attacked. Suicide? Terrence? What were the signs?
Now here she was, sitting and weeping among the congregation at Zion, and she had never seen anything like Tink and Dena’s gesture, their grip, that coming together of a couple who were now separate. She found it comforting, but it did not answer the question that Carter was still asking herself, the question that everyone in the church had to have been asking themselves: The worst thing that can happen to a family, to a young person in the prime of life, had happened to this family, to this young man. Why?
That is the conundrum that cuts to the core not just of Terrence’s death, but of suicide in the United States. There are so many contextual factors and contradictory trends that anticipating when someone might end his or her life or reaching a definitive conclusion about why someone did is akin to grasping at vapor.
Kelly Green, a psychologist and senior researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, said in an interview that the most recent available data on suicides are from the same year that Terrence died: 2023. Medical examiners must report suicide deaths to states, and states must report them to the Centers for Disease Control, and the slow grind of that bureaucratic machinery causes an information lag.
“One of the frustrations is that we’re always a couple of years behind what’s happening now,” Green said. “We’re always playing catch-up.”
Though Green noted that suicide “is still a very low base rate event — it happens rarely” — its current has been flowing in a concerning direction. The overall national rate jumped 37% from 2000 to 2018, according to the CDC, dipped by 5% between 2018 and 2020, then peaked in 2022. It held relatively steady in 2023, when 14.2 out of every 100,000 deaths were suicides.
Terrence fell within the age range, 15-24, with the second-lowest suicide rate, which would cast his death as an awful anomaly. But the CDC has reported that, although men make up 50% of the population, they account for nearly 80% of all suicides, and among Black men, according to the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention, the rate climbed from 9.41 per 100,000 deaths in 2014 to 14.59 in 2023, which would cast Terrence’s death as one stirring of the sea in a destructive tide.
“I would go even a step further,” Derrick Gordon, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, said in an interview. “In the Black community, the data show that, traditionally, suicide was not seen as a Black thing. The norm has been, ‘That’s a white thing.’ It’s sometimes seen as the antithesis of the Black faith tradition. ‘My faith isn’t strong enough to help me get past this thing, and it should, and it’s not working.’ Faith doesn’t reduce the burden. It adds to the burden.
“For a long time, there was this myth: ‘We don’t have to worry about Black people and suicide. They’re at low risk. They have more community or are more connected to their faith — a lot of buffers to protect them.’ Well, we’re seeing that’s not true.”
Tink Butler at his home in Clinton, Md. He remains involved in basketball.
Parents, siblings, loved ones: These would presumably be the strongest guardrails. But as Gordon noted, the factors that compel a person to attempt suicide are always unique to that person, and since even those closest to him or her often don’t pick up on any indications of deep distress, predicting or preventing a suicide is challenging at best and impossible at worst.
“Families never think of suicide as a possibility,” Gabriela Khazanov, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Yeshiva University in New York, said in an interview, and they can inadvertently create conditions that heighten the risk.
Terrence was one of the more than 49,000 people who died by suicide in 2023, according to the CDC … and one of the more than 55% of those who used a firearm to do it. The combination of suicidal thoughts and easy access to a gun can be lethal, in part because “it’s not that people who are suicidal want to die,” Green said. “It’s that they want to stop an intolerable situation or problem. They seek an escape,” and they are often willing to act without hesitation to relieve their pain.
A January 2009 study published by the Journal of Clinical Psychology showed that half of all suicide attempts result from less than 10 minutes of planning.
“The impulse might be quick, but the issue is, do you have means?” Gordon said. “I can think about it all I want to, but if I don’t have access to means, that’s an issue.”
Terrence Butler did have means, but it would be wrong to call his decision to use his mother’s gun impulsive. He had carried the revolver with him in his navy blue Drexel backpack on the ride from Dena’s house to Tiara and Arthur’s. He had kept it in that backpack for several hours at their home — kept it there overnight, in fact. He kept it there during the short car ride to New Carrollton Station and throughout the 1-hour, 45-minute train ride back to Philadelphia. He kept it there as he walked the three-fifths of a mile from 30th Street Station to The Summit, to a vibrant college setting in a vibrant city, and he kept it there as he opened the door to Apartment 208, to his living space with his personal effects and the memories they inspired.
It is one of the most excruciating aspects of his death: Terrence Butler had time to consider what he was going to do. He also had time to consider all the reasons, in his mind, that he had no choice but to do it.
“I thank God for loaning him to us for 21 years,” Tink Butler said during his son’s memorial service.
Signs no one could see
Inside the dimly lit auditorium of Archbishop Carroll High School in Washington, some 150 parents, coaches, teachers, and administrators gathered on a night in October 2024 and learned about Terrence Butler from the women who knew him best. The school was holding a symposium about athletes’ mental and emotional health, and Dena, Tiara, and Tasia were the first speakers. They wore black T-shirts with his picture on them. Behind a table atop a stage, Dena sat between her daughters, one arm draped over Tiara’s shoulders, one arm draped over Tasia’s. There was an empty chair next to them, for Terrence.
Three siblings. Three honor students. Three Division I basketball players. A veneer of perfection, or as close to it as a family can get. And now …
“You can have all that,” Dena said to the audience, “and your child may not want to be there.”
Tiara and Tasia did not want to be there. Over the two years since Terrence’s death, the Butlers and others have plumbed their memories and searched within themselves for hints and connections that might help them explain the inexplicable. The sisters keep returning to their own childhoods and adolescence — to Tiara’s desire to draw and paint and write and Tasia’s to dance, to Tink training them to be competitive and never treat their opponents as friends, to Dena reminding them that athletics was their conduit to college, to the pressure they felt to perform.
Before every basketball game he played, Terrence would dash to the bathroom, as if he were seasick, and his hands would sweat so much that he could barely grip the ball. He’d douse them in powder to dry them only to have it turn into paste in his palms.
At Syracuse, Tiara often couldn’t eat before games because she was so nauseous from nervousness, then would shake as she sat on the bench. And it was only after her brother had died that Tiara confessed to her family that in her instances of greatest stress she would hear noises in her head — loud, indescribable noises — that she could not quell.
“I don’t really know where it came from,” she said, “but it showed itself in my body. It showed itself in my handshake. It showed itself with me being out of breath, with my voice shaking.
“I know what that feels like, what he was feeling. You can’t really control it. If you’re not playing, there’s that daunting feeling on top of that. Am I good enough to get on the court? Part of you is like, ‘OK, I didn’t play today, so I didn’t mess up today.’ But the other part, especially when you’re away from home and you didn’t play, is that you have to explain yourself to someone who’s not there and asks, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ You’re thinking, ‘I’m working hard, doing all that I can do. It’s someone else’s decision.’ Now you’ve got to listen to that voice, too: ‘Hey, what’s really going on?’ It’s just a tough balance, especially as a kid. Then you’re going off to be by yourself, high level, lights always on …”
Tink Butler says he remains troubled daily by his son’s death.
Guilt creeped into Tink’s thoughts. Was his children’s performance anxiety purely genetic, or had he pushed them too hard? Once, when Tiara wasn’t yet a teenager, she had moseyed after a rebound during a workout, and he chucked the ball to the opposite end of the gym and bellowed at her, “RUN!” When she came back, there were tears in her eyes and a whimper in her words. You yelled at me. He backed off some with Tasia, then backed off even more with Terrence — in his tone, but not in the time, the effort, the aspirations.
“My whole life was basically getting rebounds for him,” Tink said. “That was the plan from the time I saw I was having a son: I’m going to mold this guy into a basketball player.”
Dena second-guessed herself about how she and Tink handled their divorce. She had filtered all her parenting decisions through the lens of her own childhood, through the experience of growing up in a broken home, and she wanted to spare Tiara, Tasia, and Terrence any trauma. She and Tink had taken care never to argue in front of them, hiding the hard reality of their disintegrating marriage, opening up fully about the divorce only after Tink had remarried.
“I was playing God,” she said, “in trying to control everything so they wouldn’t see certain things.”
But the upshot was that, when the three kids finally found out their parents were splitting up, they were shocked. They never saw it coming, and Terrence was the youngest, the most impressionable, the baby of the family. In trying to protect them, had Dena failed to prepare them? Had she failed to prepare him?
“It could have handicapped them,” she said. “I’m supposed to be their training ground.”
She carried similar concerns once he went off to Drexel, and she wasn’t the only one. The pandemic had already isolated Terrence, pulling him away from his friends and his social life while he was still at McNamara, from an environment and experience that, even if the lockdowns hadn’t disrupted it, would have been its own kind of cocoon.
Dena Butler’s “Proud Momma” cups featuring the school colors and logos for her three basketball-playing children.
“Prince George’s County can give you a false sense when you leave here,” said Gloster, the McNamara dean — and a former police officer. “It’s a county of wealthy African Americans, and you don’t find many Catholic schools with so many Black students where parents are paying a tuition of $22,000. Then they get out in the real world, and it’s, ‘Maybe I’m too Black. Maybe I’m not Black enough. Maybe I didn’t realize there was a lot of racism in the world. Maybe I didn’t realize I had demons inside that hadn’t surfaced.’”
Now Terrence was living in an unfamiliar campus in an unfamiliar, more economically distressed neighborhood in an unfamiliar city, and whenever Dena or Tiara or Tasia saw a news story about violence in Philadelphia, one of them would call him. Hey, don’t go outside today. Dena would warn Terrence — 6-foot-7, 235-pound, Division I athlete Terrence — not to get into a stranger’s car, and Tasia would remind him that, as a Black male college student, he “fit the description of someone who could be in trouble.”
He could be a target for a criminal or a cop, could be taken for an easy victim or presumed to be a thug, so he should get to know as many people at Drexel as possible, make sure that everyone knew his face … starting with the campus police. His popularity was based on his personality, yes, but also on self-preservation.
Near the end of his freshman year, he confessed to Arthur that he was contemplating giving up basketball after college, even during college. He had realized that the sport at these levels was a business, and he wanted to enjoy the game, not have it be his job.
He had considered transferring from Drexel when Tink pitched him the idea, but no, he told his family — and himself — that being around the team, contributing to it whenever and however he could, and graduating with his engineering degree would satisfy him.
Drexel basketball player Terrence Butler (left) and his father, Tink, on artwork at his home in Clinton, Md.
Besides, what guarantee would there be that he wouldn’t be trapped in limbo in another program just like he was at Drexel? Would transferring allow him to say goodbye to all the rehab and the ice packs and those platelet-rich-plasma injections, all those needles to his knees to stem the swelling and stoke some healing, and become the player he might have been? Would anything be different anywhere else?
But maybe he needed basketball more than he let on, more than even he understood or acknowledged. His faith calmed him only so much. Those biblical excerpts weren’t the only index cards he kept on his person at all times. He had others that were daily reaffirmations, prompts to remember that he mattered: I AM Valuable. I AM A Masterpiece. Even the white throw pillow on his bed, with a single word stitched across it, seemed to carry a double meaning. Whether asleep or awake, Terrence should RELAX.
He couldn’t. He asked Tiara to put him in touch with a therapist. She did, paying for his sessions. How much progress he was making, only he knew. He sought the counsel of Jordan Lozzi, the director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at Drexel and at Penn. On Nov. 28, 2022, Terrence sent a text message to Dena.
I do think I have a lot of unchecked thoughts. There are times where I know the truth but I try to solve everything on my own without guidance. I’ve been taking some baby steps here and there but I feel like I’m moving in slow [motion].
On March 10, 2023, he texted Dena again, confirming what he had earlier said to Arthur about his future, or lack of one, in basketball.
To be honest, it does not necessarily bother me that I’m not playing because I don’t have a passion to continue playing basketball after college. I’m still in the process of learning that my identity and worth [do] not come from basketball.
Later, another message to his mother:
I’ve always had this idea in my head that I needed to be perfect, and whenever I miss the mark or mess up in any way it messes with my head. It kind of reminds me of how I would feel after most games I played growing up. It’s difficult for me to focus on the good that comes out of situations. I may recognize it but the overwhelming negativity clouds the positive.
Dena responded at length.
I appreciate your honesty and transparency. You are not in denial about where you are which gives the Holy Spirit something to work with. Here is something that should support you in dealing with the spirit of perfectionism.
Possible things you’ll need to accept: that you’ll never be perfect and neither will your projects, but since life is about God — not perfect projects — this isn’t really a big deal.
Possible things you’ll need to confess: that you’re making something more important than God wants you to make it, that you’re seeing yourself through the culture’s eyes rather than God’s eyes, that you’re hurting others in your quest for perfection, and that you don’t have time to do the things God wants you to do because you’re too busy trying to be perfect.
She suggested that he consult the Gospel of Matthew, to remind himself that God would comfort him. Then she concluded her text:
Your goal is to please God. He is your source and once you understand that and align with His trust and what He says about you, He will cause the people to follow His plan for your life.
Dena Butler at her home in Brandywine, Md.
She keeps screenshots of these messages on her phone. They provide her no solace, no consolation, and no explanation. In November 2024, she contacted Lozzi, texting him four questions about what Terrence might have shared with him during their conversations and what actions Lozzi did take or could have taken to help him. The answers were revealing.
Terrence, Lozzi told Dena, “disclosed that he had harmed himself” sometime in April 2023, not long after he turned 21; Lozzi provided no details about how. Terrence had said it was the first time he had done anything like that.
Dena asked Lozzi if he was mandated to report any such occurrences of self-harm to a licensed therapist.
“In the college space,” Lozzi wrote, “we are mandated reporters, but I believe there is no mandated reporting for self-harm with adults. The mandated reporting in the college space is around sexual violence or relational abuse. To connect someone to suicide watch from my understanding they must be a present danger to themselves. In any of my interactions with Terrence I don’t believe there was anything that would have qualified to admit him to suicide watch.”
Lozzi was asserting that he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone that Terrence had committed harm to himself — that because Terrence was an adult, either Lozzi or a mental-health professional would have needed Terrence’s consent to disclose the incident to Dena, to another therapist, to anyone else, and Terrence had not given that consent. In his final text to Dena, Lozzi wrote that he “did propose for [Terrence] to see Drexel’s school counselors.”
When asked via email earlier this year if he would speak on the record about Terrence’s death, Lozzi responded that he had “sent your request to the appropriate person to get in touch with you right away.” He had forwarded the message to Hamilton Strategies, a public relations firm that represents the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. “Unfortunately,” an executive with the firm said in an email, “Jordan is unable to interview for your story. Thank you!” A second request for comment, sent in November to Lozzi and the executive, went unanswered.
Terrence Butler at a game with his Drexel teammates.
The struggle of hope
The why of Terrence Butler’s suicide eludes everyone who loved him. Tiara teaches art at Bishop McNamara, her brother’s alma mater, and most of her students don’t know about Terrence’s death unless she mentions him, and once she does, sometimes one of them will approach her in her classroom and say, I just wanted to give you a hug. Tink will break down over his son once or twice a day, then just continue with his office work. He still asks himself haunting questions: How much did the divorce affect Terrence? How much did the knee injuries affect him? Did he consider himself a burden to his parents, as if he owed them a debt for all the time they had spent with him and money they had spent on him — a debt that he could never repay?
After Philadelphia police had ruled Terrence’s death a suicide, Dena said, she pleaded with them to unlock his cell phone. Perhaps he had written something in his notes app. Perhaps he kept a meaningful or revelatory photo stored in it. But the police, she said, told her that they would do that only in an open investigation — a homicide, for instance, in which they were trying to find and extract evidence. Here, they already knew what had happened, even if no one else really does. The department’s public affairs office did not respond to an inquiry about how, in general, police handle such situations.
Having the service provider unlock the phone wouldn’t accomplish anything either, Dena said, because only Terrence knew the passcode; resetting the phone without the code would erase all its data. She recently had the phone disconnected. It was a bitter symbol of the absence of closure.
“What I struggle with the most to understand in all this,” she said, “is that my son was devoid of hope, that he was in such despair, and he didn’t want anybody to help him. As a mom, to know your child didn’t have hope anymore … and hope is what gets us. Hope is what propels us. Hope is the motivator for why we keep going. And to know he didn’t have that, that’s hard.”
Zach Spiker finds himself slower to anger whenever one of his players happens to be late for a team meeting, for a practice, for anything. “I just want to make sure they’re safe,” he said. “Then we talk about it.” He saw a counselor himself, just a few sessions. “I had to,” he said. “I need to figure out things. I still have questions. There are still breadcrumbs, and you want to solve the mystery.”
They hoped that they had on the day that Terrence died. That night, 11 people crowded into his apartment: Dena, Tiara, Tasia, Tink and his wife, cousins and close family friends. Everything in the place was clean. There was nothing on his bed but a bare mattress. “You would have never known,” Tiara said later.
Tasia peered into the bedroom trash can. It was empty. She noticed Terrence’s Drexel backpack next to his bed. She picked it up, brought it into the living room, plopped it on the floor, and began rifling through it. She found random items, things that one would expect to find in a college student’s backpack: Terrence’s schoolwork, his headphones. Then she found something else.
Dena Butler touches a journal that belonged to her son, Terrence.
The spiral 5×7 notebook, more than a half-inch thick from its 160 pages, was buried at the bottom of the bag. Tasia stopped. Tiara recognized the book, that sky-blue cover that she had glimpsed just four days before: It’s the same one he was writing in when he was at my house. Across the cover, Terrence had printed two words in black marker: My Brain.
This was it. This had to be it. This was Terrence’s journal, so this had to be the missing piece, the unknown explanation. Everyone in the apartment froze, went silent, then sat down. Tasia opened the book.
On the first page, on the top line, Terrence had written, I’m sorry. I really tried.
On the second page, on the top line, he had written, The noise is too loud.
On the third page, on the top line, in the top left-hand corner, he had written just one letter, just one word: I.
Tasia turned the page. And the next page. And the next. The family waited for a revelation that would never come. There were 157 pages remaining in the notebook. Terrence Butler had left all of them blank.
Back in September 1873, the New York Herald announced that the Hudson River School painter Jasper Francis Cropsey had a new painting. Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway, which would be open to public viewing for “only a day or two longer” at the Wall Street office of Charles Day, the article said.
The painting was commissioned by investor James McHenry, who, with Day, was director of Erie Railway. McHenry, who had been a director of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway before that, had his eye set on the Erie Railway, which was founded in 1832.
In 1872, in what is best described as a corporate coup, McHenry ousted the railroad magnate Jay Gould and took full control over Erie Railway. In celebration, he commissioned the Cropsey painting, which, after those few days on Wall Street, made its way to McHenry’s home in London and remained in private collections, away from the public eye since.
Until now.
In 2024, philanthropists J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox, who live in Bucks County, bought the painting and brought it back to the United States. It is on view at the Brandywine Museum of Art, some 150 miles away from the original setting of the painting, where flatlands west of the Hudson River meet steep hills near the town of Sloatsburg, N.Y.
Here, it can be seen by an American audience for the first time in 152 years.
The Foxes and American art
J. Jeffrey Fox has built a successful career in finance and education and his wife, Ann Marie, has worked with several nonprofits, often focusing on children with special needs. Together, in 2024, they made a $20 million gift to endow the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School at Pennsylvania State University.
The couple, said Jeffrey Fox, have always been interested in American history.
“We used to collect art as souvenirs. We would go to estate sales and garage sales and sometimes buy a piece of art,” he said. “It wasn’t a collection that was of any significance. So once we got a little bit more money, we wanted to buy one painting that’ll be the centerpiece for the rest of our collection.”
They bought Frederick Childe Hassam’s The Cove, Isles of Shoals (1901) at an auction in 2015.
The discerning eye in the couple has always been Ann Marie’s. She spent 15 years volunteering at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and when the couple lived in Annapolis, Md., she took classes under Matt Herban, a retired professor of art from Ohio State University.
After that first Hassam, the couple wanted a Cropsey. But not just any Cropsey.
“We went to the National Gallery and they had a fabulous Cropsey [Autumn — On the Hudson River (1860)]. It just took our breath away. And we were like, ‘Wow, how could we ever get something that good.’ That’s why it took us this long,” said Ann Marie.
“We were very picky. Every artist has great days, and every artist has OK days. We wanted Cropsey on a great day,” her husband said.
Finding Cropsey on a great day
Last year, the Foxes’ art adviser came to know from a friend in Europe that Autumn in the Ramapo Valley was coming up for auction in London in September. Believing that the painting was best sold to an American buyer, this friend approached the adviser before the painting went under the hammer.
The Foxes had 48 hours to make a decision to buy, never having seen the painting, aided only by a high-quality photograph and a condition report.
Cropsey’s catalog raisonné, put together by the Newington Cropsey Foundation in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., says the painting left the country in September 1873. Documents said the painting has been in an undisclosed buyer’s family since the 1950s.
James McHenry’s carte-de-visite,
1861.
McHenry died in 1891 and “we don’t really know what happened from 1891 to the mid-’50s, but we do know that it never left England,” Jeffrey said. “And we don’t think it was ever shown in England. There are no records that we were able to find.”
Ann Marie said yes, and the couple wrote up a letter of intent.
“We were a bit concerned,” said Jeffrey. Another Cropsey — Richmond Hill in summer of 1862, also owned by McHenry — that came up in an auction in 2013 was deemed a “national treasure” by the U.K. and was not allowed to leave the country.
The clearance for Autumn in Ramapo to leave England took a little over three months.
“The English let that out of England because it was an American artist, and an American scene,” Jeffrey said.
The couple bought the painting in January 2025. Once the artwork arrived in the United States, a restorer found it to be in exceptional condition, exactly as advertised. In March, the conservator finished assessing the painting, and the Foxes traveled to New York to see it in real life.
“It just displayed so much grandeur. I thought it was wonderful,” Anne Marie said. “The autumn colors … just stunning. And the size of it is amazing. The first thing I said when I saw it was, ‘It can’t come to my house. It’s going to tear down my wall.”
Including the frame, the artwork measures 4.75 feet by 7.16 feet.
“Our house isn’t that big, we probably couldn’t get through the door,” Jeffrey said.
The couple couldn’t ship it to their foundation office, either. “We needed a museum that would be willing to show it and buy into the story, because it’s a phenomenal story,” Jeffrey said.
The “Cropsey, Wyeth, and the American Landscape Tradition” exhibition runs through May 31 at the Brandywine Museum of Art.
The painting and the painter
It’s easy to miss the “Erie Railway” part in Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway. Cropsey paints an idyllic fall scene with the Ramapo Valley bathed in yellow, red, and, orange foliage. Bits of green peep out, the sky is clear and a light blue, a waterfall flows gently on the left, the Ramapo River sits still.
The smoke-billowing train chugs through the valley in the distance, but in the center of the painting. Black rails of the railway bridge run parallel to the river and disappear into the leaves.
The setting of the painting falls between what is New York’s Orange and Rockland County, on the western side of the Hudson River, and north of Suffern.
“This painting … really helps in telling a fuller story of the history of American art, and particularly, this brief moment, in the third quarter of the 19th century, when huge sums were being spent on huge paintings,” said William L. Coleman, curator at the Wyeth Foundation and director of the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center.
“This is part of a larger story with artists like Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran.”
Jasper Francis Cropsey by Napoleon Sarony, circa 1870.
Cropsey, an architect who had designed several railway stations himself, was part of a line of artists who “engaged with the new fortunes being made from the transportation industry, making images of new railroads traveling through the landscapes,” Coleman said.
The artists enjoyed generous patronage and lived well. Cropsey lived in a mansion he built, called Aladdin, less than 10 miles away from the site of the painting. Here he built himself a studio that doubled as a gallery and art marketplace.
The Philadelphia story
Cropsey’s patron James McHenry was born in Ireland in 1817 and was raised in Philadelphia. He moved back to England, living primarily in London, where he made a fortune raising money and investing it in developing railways in America.
His sister remained in Philadelphia until her death.
Jeffrey Fox calls McHenry “notorious,” adding that he often worked against other equally infamous “robber barons” like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Gould.
“He paid $25,000 on a Bierstadt painting in 1865, so he was quite an art collector himself,” Jeffrey said. McHenry, who already owned Richmond Hill in Summerof 1862, perhaps had gotten acquainted with Cropsey when the artist visited England in 1856.
Cropsey had already made a name for himself painting Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania (1865) —where, too, a distant train almost merges into the green slopes of the mountain behind it — when McHenry wanted an artist to commemorate his pushing Gould out of the Erie Railroad directorship in 1873.
“He had already gotten a national reputation for painting part of this exact railroad, and so James McHenry went to the railroad guy,” said Coleman, “and commissioned Autumn in Ramapo.”
Artists like Bierstadt and Sanford Robinson Gifford were also working on similar railroad commissions at the time.
“Most of their stock and trade are images that make use of the aesthetic value of the sublime, the power of the natural world against the small scale of human existence. So they give us that feeling of awe, of wonder,” Coleman said.
Landscape paintings, he said, “tell stories about belonging, about ownership, about your place in a wider society. … And they often risk being underestimated. These are pleasant, old pictures that we see on calendars and postage stamps, but they have a lot to tell us about how we became the nation we are today.”
The model train at Brandywine Museum’s holiday showcase in 2018.
An irrelevant cost
At Brandywine, Cropsey’s train speaks to the museum’s beloved holiday train display, posing questions of tradition and modernity as the nation enters its 250th year.
It will stay at the museum through May and then travel to the Dixon Museum in Memphis, Tenn. Then it heads to the Seed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky.;, Rockwell Museum in Corning, N.Y,; University of Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Ga.; and the Newington Cropsey Foundation.
The Foxes wanted this piece of American history to be witnessed by Americans.
What they paid for it, Jeffrey Fox said, is irrelevant.
“If you put a value to it, that’s what you’re going to talk about, as opposed to the painting,” he said. “We’re a foundation and at the end of the day, we’re not going to sell it. So it doesn’t matter what we paid.”
“Cropsey, Wyeth, and the American Landscape Tradition,” continues through May 31 at the Brandywine Museum of Art, U.S. Route 1 at Hoffmans Mill Road in Chadds Ford, Chester County. Information: brandywine.org or 610-388-2700.
This article has been updated with the correct year of James McHenry gaining control of the Erie Railway. It was 1872.
Tomorrow is the first day of winter, but the snow has already started. I invited two Inquirer staffers who have to shovel their sidewalks to answer the seasonal issue.
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Evan Weiss
Deputy Features Editor
The question is…
I usually shovel beyond my own sidewalk, but my younger neighbor only does his patch. Am I expecting too much from him?
Tommy Rowan
Programming Editor
It depends on the type of youngin' we're talking about. If they have a Doordash order on their stoop after it already snowed 4 inches and it's still coming down, then yes, you're expecting too much.
Sam Ruland
Features Planning and Coverage Editor
Yeah, that’s exactly it. I still feel like a jerk if I only shovel my own sidewalk, that’s just how I was raised. But I also know that’s not the default anymore. Some people are strictly “my patch is clear, my work here is done,” and apparently that’s acceptable now.
Sam Ruland
I just can’t stop at the property line without feeling weird about it… especially when I live on a block where neighbors will bring your trash cans back to your house if they get to them first.
Tommy Rowan
Yeah and if there are elderly people on your block, that should just be automatic. You know, we're trying to live in a society!
Sam Ruland
Once elderly neighbors are involved, pretending you didn’t notice becomes embarrassing.
Evan Weiss
Maybe your neighbor was in a rush one time or their back hurt, but if you know they're physically capable and they always stop at the border… that's being a bad neighbor.
Sam Ruland
Totally. One time, fine. Life happens. But if you’re physically capable and it’s every storm, people notice. And once it becomes a habit, I’m gonna feel a lot less bad about moving your cone and parking in your spot when the snow melts.
Tommy Rowan
I was one of those kids who would grab their plastic shovels during snowstorms and go around with a few buddies to knock on doors and offer our shoveling services for a few dollars. Then we'd get pizza and a few cool, refreshing glasses of Mountain Dew.
Tommy Rowan
I may sound old, but I don't see those kids around anymore.
Sam Ruland
What REALLY gets me is watching the single mom on my block out there shoveling by herself while her three sons are completely MIA. I don’t know about you, but that would not have stood in my house. And Philly notices stuff like that.
Tommy Rowan
Yeah, that ain't right.
Sam Ruland
My dad had three daughters, and if he was home, he took the lead on shoveling. And if he was at work? There was no way my mom (with her forever aching back) was going to be out there alone.
Tommy Rowan
Yeah and if a neighbor saw your mom or you doing it alone they would have yelled at you for not asking for help!
Sam Ruland
That public scolding was mortifying and honestly enough to shape my entire personality. Which is basically how I operate now. I don’t want to shovel. I hate it. But I’d rather suffer for 20 minutes than be silently judged by my neighbors all winter. I don’t shovel because I love it. I shovel because I fear the block.
Evan Weiss
Okay, if a few kids knock on your door asking for money to shovel, how much do you give them?
Tommy Rowan
Depends on the size of the property.
Sam Ruland
I want to say $5.
Evan Weiss
Yeah, $5 seems fair for a rowhouse.
Tommy Rowan
And $10 for a rowhouse if they also dig out the car. If we're talking a Northeast house, with a full driveway, sidewalk, and steps, that's at least $20. And possibly a hot chocolate Mountain Dew break.
Evan Weiss
Any final advice?
Sam Ruland
Snow melts. Reputation doesn’t. Help your neighbors.
This conversation has been edited for length.
What other Very Philly Questions should we address?
Can you see all four? There is one “real” image of SEPTA trolley operator Victoria Daniels and three different reflections.
I only saw two reflections as I was trying to focus and compose while bracing my camera on the back of a seat to stabilize myself on the moving trolley. I wanted to photograph the light at the end of the tunnel (the metaphor was apt, as tens of thousands of riders are hoping for some relief as service in the Center City Tunnel has been shut down for weeks.)
Trolley slider parts are on display as Jason Tarlecki, acting SEPTA chief engineer of power, talks with the news media at the 40th Street trolley portal.
More than just a “talker” the SEPTA folks first showed lots of equipment parts and then we got to take a field trip, riding a trolley into the closed tunnel to see where they were repairing the overhead wire.
While, for most of the media, the ride was just a way to get to the closed station for the show-and-tell, for me it was an opportunity to take pictures out the windows — something I like to do anytime I am on public transit. And play around with exposures …
…which sometimes just doesn’t work out.
Two things that did work out photographically this week; the first snowfall of the season:
And, on the same day, a firefighter Santa riding through the neighborhood.
Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:
December 15, 2025: A historical interpreter waits at the parking garage elevators headed not to a December crossing of the Delaware River, but an event at the National Constitution Center. General George Washington was on his way to an unveiling of the U.S. Mint’s new 2026 coins for the Semiquincentennial, December 8, 2025: The Benjamin Franklin Bridge and pedestrians on the Delaware River Trail are reflected in mirrored spheres of the “Weaver’s Knot: Sheet Bend” public artwork on Columbus Boulevard. The site-specific stainless steel piece located between the Cherry Street and Race Street Piers was commissioned by the City’s Public Art Office and the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation and created and installed in 2022 by the design and fabrication group Ball-Nogues Studio. The name recalls a history that dominated the region for hundreds of years. “Weaver’s knot” derives from use in textile mills and the “Sheet bend” or “sheet knot” was used on sailing vessels for bending ropes to sails. November 29, 2025: t’s ginkgo time in our region again when the distinctive fan-shaped leaves turn yellow and then, on one day, lose all their leaves at the same time laying a carpet on city streets and sidewalks. A squirrel leaps over leaves in the 18th Century Garden in Independence National Historical Park Nov. 25, 2025. The ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) is considered a living fossil as it’s the only surviving species of a group of trees that existed before dinosaurs. Genetically, it has remained unchanged over the past 200 million years. William Hamilton, owner the Woodlands in SW Phila (no relation to Alexander Hamilton) brought the first ginkgo trees to North America in 1785.November 24, 2025: The old waiting room at 30th Street Station that most people only pass through on their way to the restrooms has been spiffed up with benches – and a Christmas tree. It was placed there this year in front of the 30-foot frieze, “The Spirit of Transportation” while the lobby of Amtrak’s $550 million station restoration is underway. The 1895 relief sculpture by Karl Bitter was originally hung in the Broad Street Station by City Hall, but was moved in 1933. It depicts travel from ancient to modern and even futuristic times. November 17, 2025: Students on a field trip from the Christian Academy in Brookhaven, Delaware County, pose for a group photo in front of the Liberty Bell in Independence National Historical Park on Thursday. The trip was planned weeks earlier, before they knew it would be on the day park buildings were reopening after the government shutdown ended. “We got so lucky,” a teacher said. Then corrected herself. “It’s because we prayed for it.” November 8, 2025: Multitasking during the Festival de Día de Muertos – Day of the Dead – in South Philadelphia.November 1, 2025: Marcy Boroff is at City Hall dressed as a Coke can, along with preschoolers and their caregivers, in support of former Mayor Jim Kenney’s 2017 tax on sweetened beverages. City Council is considering repealing the tax, which funds the city’s pre-K programs. October 25, 2025: Austin Gabauer, paint and production assistant at the Johnson Atelier, in Hamilton Twp, N.J. as the finished “O” letter awaits the return to Philadelphia. The “Y” part of the OY/YO sculpture is inside the painting booth. The well-known sculpture outside the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History was removed in May while construction continues on Market Street and has been undergoing refurbishment at the Atelier at the Grounds for Sculpture outside of Trenton.October 20, 2025:The yellow shipping container next to City Hall attracted a line of over 300 people that stretched around a corner of Dilworth Park. Bystanders wondered as they watched devotees reaching the front take their selfies inside a retro Philly diner-esque booth tableau. Followers on social media had been invited to “Climb on to immerse yourself in the worlds of Pleasing Fragrance, Big Lip, and exclusive treasures,” including a spin of the “Freebie Wheel,” for products of the unisex lifestyle brand Pleasing, created by former One Direction singer Harry Styles.October 11, 2025: Can you find the Phillie Phanatic, as he leaves a “Rally for Red October Bus Tour” stop in downtown Westmont, N.J. just before the start of the NLDS? There’s always next year and he’ll be back. The 2026 Spring Training schedule has yet to be announced by Major League Baseball, but Phillies pitchers and catchers generally first report to Clearwater, Florida in mid-February.October 6. 2025: Fluorescent orange safety cone, 28 in, Poly Ethylene. Right: Paint Torch (detail) Claes Oldenburg, 2011, Steel, Fiberglass Reinforced Plastic, Gelcoat and Polyurethane. (Gob of paint, 6 ft. Main sculpture, 51 ft.). Lenfest Plaza at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on North Broad Street, across from the Convention Center.September 29, 2025: A concerned resident who follows Bucks County politics, Kevin Puls records the scene before a campaign rally for State Treasurer Stacy Garrity, the GOP candidate for governor. His T-shirt is “personal clickbait” with a url to direct people to the website for The Travis Manion Foundation created to empower veterans and families of fallen heroes. The image on the shirts is of Greg Stocker, one of the hosts of Kayal and Company, “A fun and entertaining conservative spin on Politics, News, and Sports,” mornings on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT.September 22, 2025: A shadow is cast by “The Cock’s Comb,” created by Alexander “Sandy” Calder in 1960, is the first work seen by visitors arriving at Calder Gardens, the new sanctuary on the Ben Franklin Parkway. The indoor and outdoor spaces feature the mobiles, stabiles, and paintings of Calder, who was born in Philadelphia in 1898, the third generation of the family’s artistic legacy in the city.September 15, 2025: Department of Streets Director of Operations Thomas Buck leaves City Hall following a news conference marking the activation of Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) cameras on the Broad Street corridor – one the city’s busiest and most dangerous roads. The speed limit on the street, also named PA Route 611, is 25 mph.
Every Philly-adjacent viral saga eventually ends the same way: not with a plot twist, but with probation.
The Delco Pooper (a title no one asked for but Delaware County fully delivered) finally reached the unglamorous end of her moment in the internet sun this week. Instead of a trial, Christina Solometo entered a first-time offender program that includes probation, community service, anger management, and a strict “no posting about this” rule that feels tailor-made for someone who briefly became a meme.
If she completes it all, her record could be wiped clean. Which feels… both reasonable and deeply unceremonious, given how loudly this story echoed across the internet.
Here’s the thing: This was never really a crime story. It was a spectacle. A perfect storm of road rage, cell phone video, Delco energy, and a news cycle that will absolutely stop to rubberneck if given the chance. The moment went viral because it was shocking and absurd, not because anyone was asking for a legal reckoning.
And now, like most viral Philly chaos, it fizzles out in a courtroom with no cameras and a lot less laughter.
The C grade isn’t about whether the punishment fits the offense. It’s about the strange disconnect between how massive this story became and how ordinary its ending is. Two years of probation and some mandated self-reflection doesn’t feel dramatic. But maybe that’s the point. Real life isn’t a meme, and viral notoriety doesn’t translate to anything meaningful once the internet moves on.
Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts (1) scores a touchdown against the New York Giants during the third quarter of an NFL football game, Sunday, Dec. 11, 2022, in East Rutherford, N.J. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Taking back a Jalen Hurts touchdown ball: D
If a quarterback hands you a touchdown ball, that’s not a loan. That’s a gift. And if the allegations in this lawsuit are even mostly true, what followed was one of the most aggressively uncool things the NFL industrial complex could’ve done to a fan.
Jalen Hurts scored, made history, and chose a guy in an Eagles jersey to share the moment with. That should’ve been the end. Instead, according to the suit, it turned into security, state police, and multiple officials allegedly insisting the fan return the ball, including being told he’d be “breaking the law” if he didn’t.
Yes, historic game balls matter. Yes, teams want them back. But there is a time-honored, normal-person solution here: You ask nicely, you offer a jersey or autographs, everyone leaves happy. What you don’t do is allegedly escalate a good-vibes moment into a stadium-security fever dream.
If this played out the way it’s described, the failure wasn’t policy. It was vibes. You can’t spend all week saying fans are the heart of the game and then, on Sunday, treat one like he stole the Declaration of Independence.
That said — and this is where Philly clears its throat — declaring you’re no longer an Eagles fan over it is… a lot. We’ve survived the Vet, Santa, and several entire seasons of Chip Kelly. Eagles fandom is not something you simply return at the gate like a confiscated football.
So yes: If the ball was forcibly taken back, that’s deeply uncool and deserves a D. But also: Buddy, you still bleed green. You just had a very bad day at MetLife.
Every winter, Philadelphia relearns the same brutal lesson: The stoop is not a safe place, especially in December. This week’s Philly Reddit reminder came courtesy of a transplant who made it almost a full year without incident, a rare and beautiful run, only to have a Christmas package stolen. Not electronics. Not sneakers. Homemade cookies from an aunt. The kind of theft that doesn’t just steal stuff, but steals joy.
The comments quickly turned into a familiar group therapy session: delivery drivers who won’t ring the bell, packages sitting untouched until they’re suddenly gone, neighbors debating whether knocking on strangers’ doors makes you a Good Samaritan or a suspect on Ring footage. One person suggested fake poop packages. Another admitted they stopped ordering anything between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Several people basically said, “Welcome. This is Philly.”
The unofficial Philly solution, as always, is community. Grab your neighbor’s packages. Knock if you see a box sitting too long. Use lockers if you can. Put up a sign that says “PLEASE RING THE BELL” and hope for the best.
The two most-beloved Pennsylvania convenience store chains are just .3 miles apart – with a CVS in between – Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024, as the first Wawa in Central Pennsylvania – solid Sheetz territory – had its grand opening in the Dauphin County borough of Middletown.
Wawa absolutely cooking Sheetz: A+
Wawa once again reminded Pennsylvania who the main character is. The Delco-born convenience store giant is still the state’s largest private company. And while Sheetz’s revenue took a 20% tumble, Wawa kept cruising, widening the gap like a hoagie wrapper slowly unpeeling in victory.
Sure, Wawa’s revenue dipped slightly on paper. In reality? The lights were on, the coffee was hot, and no one has ever stress-cried in a Wawa parking lot at 2 a.m. wishing they were at Sheetz instead. That’s brand power you can’t spreadsheet.
Sheetz hired more people. Wawa hired none of our doubts. It’s expanding, it’s everywhere, and it continues to dominate the only metric that truly matters in this region: where people go when they’re tired, hungry, and emotionally fragile.
The Christmas Village mystery package hut: A
Only in Philadelphia would one of the longest lines at the Christmas Village be for a booth selling completely unknown items in heavily taped boxes. No cocoa, no ornaments, no guarantees. Just curiosity, chaos, and the real possibility you’re paying $25 for either a diamond bracelet or a deadbolt.
Hundreds of people a day are voluntarily handing over cash for packages nobody ordered, nobody claimed, and nobody is allowed to peek inside. It’s reckless. It’s hopeful. It’s the purest form of “eh, sure” spending this city has ever embraced.
Watching grown adults aggressively shake mystery mail like they’re working airport security is peak Philly behavior. So is opening it immediately, accepting your fate, and announcing it’s “actually perfect” no matter what comes out. Lacy lingerie? Seasonal. Random hardware? Useful. Animal pregnancy tests? That’s a story you’ll be telling for years.
This hut works because it removes all the pressure of gift-giving. You didn’t pick a bad present — the box did. And now it’s everyone’s problem.
Some cities do traditional Christmas markets. Philly sells you a taped-up question mark and says, “Good luck.”
FILE – Chicago Cubs closing pitcher Brad Keller celebrates after the Cubs defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates in a baseball game, Aug. 16, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty, File)
Phillies landing Brad Keller: A-
Credit where it’s due: The Phillies actually identified a problem and spent real money fixing it. That alone deserves applause.
Brad Keller isn’t a flashy closer signing or a back-page splash, but he’s exactly what this bullpen has been screaming for: a legit, high-leverage righty who doesn’t make everyone start bargaining with the universe in the seventh inning. A 2.07 ERA, a fastball that suddenly touches 97, and proof he can handle pressure without combusting? We’ll take it.
This is also a refreshing break from the Phillies’ recent bullpen habit of “maybe this guy will be fine” optimism. Keller isn’t a flier. He’s a bet. And at two years, $22 million, it’s a smart one. Not cheap, not reckless, just intentional. That’s new.
Is there risk? Of course. Relievers are famously fragile creatures. But after last postseason’s bullpen roulette wheel, it’s hard to argue this team didn’t need another arm they can trust when the game tightens and the stadium starts vibrating.
The best part: This move signals awareness. Dave Dombrowski didn’t pretend last year’s formula was good enough. He didn’t wait for July. He didn’t say “internal options” and hope everyone forgot October.
No parade yet. But for once, the Phillies didn’t ignore the fire and buy another rug.
Donna Kelce and Jason Kelce pose for a photo at the premier of Jason Kelce’s documentary at Suzanne Roberts Theater in Philadelphia on Friday, Sept. 9, 2023. The film, “Kelce,” is a feature-length documentary featuring Jason Kelce and the Eagles’ 2022-23 season.
Donna Kelce on ‘The Traitors’: A (Philly claims her, sorry not sorry)
Donna Kelce entering a Scottish castle to scheme, lie, and possibly backstab for $250,000 feels less like reality TV casting and more like destiny. Yes, she technically gave birth to two NFL stars in different cities. But let’s be clear: Jason Kelce played his entire Hall of Fame career here, wore a Mummers parade costume, screamed about underdogs, and permanently imprinted his mom onto the city’s cultural fabric. Donna Kelce is Philly now.
Watching her plot alongside Johnny Weir (a Coatesville native, also claimed) is just icing on the Tastykake. While the rest of the cast is stacked with reality-show professionals who’ve been training for deception their whole lives, Donna’s superpower is subtler: calm mom energy and the ability to disappoint you with one look. That’s lethal in a game like this.
Also, the idea of Donna Kelce quietly maneuvering through a castle while reality stars spiral feels extremely on brand. She has raised elite athletes, survived Super Bowl media weeks, and somehow stayed likable through all of it. A few traitors don’t stand a chance.
If she wins, we’re counting it as a hometown victory. If she betrays someone? Even better.
On a November afternoon, Gary Shusman slid hundreds of dollars’ worth of caviar across the counter for inspection at the Center City oyster bar Pearl & Mary. The seven 1-ounce tins were flipped upside down so the chef could scan the individual eggs for irregularities. Deep-green pearls of golden osetra glistened like tiny emeralds in the overhead light.
They were all perfect.
Shusman, 50, is in the business of tiny fish eggs. His company CaviarXS supplies the Philadelphia region’s most in-demand restaurants with sturgeon caviar imported from parts of Europe and Asia. Shusman only sells wholesale so his prices don’t reflect retail rates, he said, but a single kilogram of similar-grade caviar could cost consumers roughly $3,500.
These precious beads are on the menu at nearly 50 upscale hotels and restaurants in and around Philly. They’re heaped on bluefin tuna nigiri at Jesse Ito’s notoriously difficult-to-book Royal Sushi omakase. They ooze out of a $65 double cheeseburger from Honeysuckle. They’re spooned onto petite rye tartlets filled with wagyu tartare at Emmett and plated next to crispy gold pierogis at Harp & Crown.
A tin of golden osetra caviar sourced by Gary Shusman’s CaviarXS, which supplies caviar to many of Philly’s most in-demand restaurants. Similar grade caviar retails for $3,500 per kilogram.
Provenance, Her Place Supper Club, and Friday Saturday Sunday — three of Shusman’s top clients — all took home Philadelphia’s first Michelin stars. Several others, including Honeysuckle, earned recommendations from the storied gastronomic guide.
Chefs choose to work with Shusman because his concierge-esque style adds an extra layer of luxury to caviar — something his clients say they appreciate as the fish eggs become trendier and more “accessible.”
“I think chefs are artists,” Shusman said, “and what I do is like supplying paint to Michelangelo.”
Despite the hoi polloi’s enthusiasm,caviar still occupies a mostlyrarified space in Philly. It’s largely reserved for high-end tastings and prix fixe menus, meted out carefully with a mother-of-pearl spoon. The fish eggs’ growing presence represents a rising tension in Philly’s food scene, which attracts national acclaim — and with it, more expensive restaurants — as the city continues to have a stark poverty rate.
Some chefs say, let caviar be caviar.
Class dynamics are top of mind at North Broad Street’s Honeysuckle. Chef Omar Tate uses Shusman’s caviar for the McDonald’s Money: a pricey burger sandwiched by milk bread that’s adorned with black truffles, flecks of edible 24-karat gold, and golden osetra pearls.
The McDonald’s Money double cheeseburger from Honeysuckle includes CaviarXS golden osetra, truffles, and edible gold fleks. “It’s a metaphor for consuming the money you don’t have,” said Tate.
It’s an ode to Tate’s childhood in Germantown. When he would ask parents for money to get McDonald’s, “I’d get told no because we didn’t have it,” he said. “There’s truffle on this burger, there’s caviar … It’s a metaphor for consuming the money you don’t have.”
Like most everythingat Tate’s culinary celebration of the Black American diaspora, the burger elicits a big reaction. The presentation’s dramatic irony makes the fish eggs feel more relevant, said Tate, who didn’t learn what caviar was — let alone taste it — until his mid-20s. He doesn’t feel like he was missing out.
“Caviar was never meant to be something consumed at scale, Tate said. ”It’s not food … it’s more closely related to a drug.”
In Society Hill, Provenance chef-owner Nich Bazik agrees that caviar isn’t meant for mass consumption. “Making it cheaper and more accessible just dilutes the product and takes away that exclusiveness, takes away from that moment you want to save up for,” said Bazik, who has a course dedicated to caviar at his French and Korean tasting counter.
Pearls of golden osetra caviar sourced by Gary Shusman sit atop a pile of crème fraîche and squash at chef Nicholas Bazik’s Provenance in Old City.
From nightclubs to caviar bumps
Like Tate, Shusman remembers what it’s like to go without. He and his parents immigrated from Kyiv to Philly in 1989 as the Soviet Union collapsed. He can still recall the scarcity he felt during his childhood in Ukraine, where supermarket shelves would frequently be bare from food shortages.
Caviar has captivated him since he was a kid. He had his first taste while still living inthe U.S.S.R. The pearls, served straight from the tin, were a rare treat procuredfrom the black marketby his uncle, a butcher, or his mother, who worked in food transportation. Once stateside, Shusman’s father made his living by importing Eastern European foods, including caviar.
“I don’t remember ever not liking [caviar], mostly because there was no telling when I would have it again,” said Shusman, licking his lips. “It transports you. You taste the sea.”
Caviar eggs take a decade to develop inside the stomachs of female sturgeon, a hulking freshwater fish most closely associated with the beluga native to the Caspian Sea. To harvest the eggs, you must kill the sturgeon — a controversial process that involves slicing open the stomach to reveal walls of tiny black, amber, or deep-green pearls.
While the caviar industry was undergoing its first major transformation, Shusman, then in his 30s, was partying in Philly. He owned a trio of now-shuttered nightclubs — including Rittenhouse Square’s Rumor and beloved EDM venue Soundgarden — when his wife asked him to consider leaving the industry to focus on fatherhood.
“It was a nonstop party, but it was a lot of work, a lot of stress,” said Shusman, who lives in Richboro, Bucks County, with his wife and two preteen sons. (So far, only one son likes caviar.)
Shusman was working as a real estate developer in 2017 when he found his way back to caviar. He was dining at Royal Sushi’s omakase counter when he gave chef Jesse Ito some unsolicited feedback about the caviar being served.
Royal Sushi’s chutoro tuna nigiri is topped with a heap of CaviarXS’s golden osetra. Chef Jesse Ito was the company’s first official client.
“His caviar wasn’t — I don’t want to say it was bad. It was just OK,” recalled Shusman. “I told him I could find him something better.”
Shusman has supplied Ito with caviar ever since, establishing CaviarXS in 2018. His business largely comes from word of mouth: Bazik learned of Shusman from a Bon Appétit video about Royal Sushi, then recommended him to Evan Snyder at Emmett. Friday Saturday Sunday co-owner Chad Williams connected him to Tate. Chef Amanda Shulman sent Shusman’s number to her husband, Alex Kemp, before the couple opened My Loup in 2023.
CaviarXS’ clients almost exclusively choose golden osetra caviar, a mild, slightly nutty variety that Shusman believes to be the best. He sources it from the Caspian region, though he declines to divulge the names of the farms (or his prices).
“It’s hard to get an exact answer out of people as to where the caviar really comes from, which creates a general distrust,” said Provenance’s Bazik. “I could go online or talk to a rep from a company that says they source their caviar from this place or that place with no stamp of authenticity. Or I could call Gary.”
Crab toast from My Loup topped with CaviarXS pearls. The restaurant, co-owner and chef Alex Kemp said, is loyal to Gary Shusman and his company.
A milkman for fish eggs
Origin aside, chefs choose Shusman’s caviar because he personallydelivers it, kind of like a high-end milkman.
“It’s about the way you make them feel … Chefs like when you hold their hand,” Shusman said. “It’s my personality. I’m very likable.”
Twice a month, Shusman travels to the Brooklyn warehouse where his caviar is stored to handpick the roe he sells to chefs. He searches for perfect pearls — uniform beads of amber that sparkle. They should burst when pressed to the roof of your mouth, he said.
On any given Tuesday or Thursday, Shusman drives around Philly for hours in his white Mercedes-Benz, dropping off tins of caviar in cooler bags printed with photo-realisticfish eggs. In between stops, he take meetings on his phone for his real estate business.
Shusman makes upward of 10 caviar deliveries a day. Often, he’ll clinch a sale by asking chefs to taste the product on the spot.
The pearls permeate much of Shusman’s life. He spoons beads of golden osetra atop of fluffy scrambled eggs for breakfast. Even Shusman’s dog — a 6-year-old Yorkie — gets caviar as a treat. Every time he starts the engineof his car,Shusman’s electronic dashboard beams the words “Hello, Gary Caviar.”
Shusman’s personal deliveries stand out because Philly doesn’t yet have a caviar market large enough to demand that level of service, said Bazik, unlike New York City or Chicago. (That may change now that the Michelin Guide has landed here, Bazik hopes.)
Provenance’s fall 2025 tasting menu included a squash and licorice powder custard topped with a whipped tofu mousse, sorghum puffs, and a spoonful of CaviarXS golden osetra caviar.
“I’m so spoiled … I can count on Gary to go above and beyond,” said Alex Kemp, whose wife and My Loup co-owner earned a Michelin star for Her Place Supper Club.
At My Loup, Shusman’s caviar currently speckles a $35 whitefish doughnut. In the past, Kemp said, he’s used the osetra to top a sour cream-and-onion pork rind and creamy sea urchin mousse: “It tastes so clean.”
Kemp’s loyalty to Shusman runs deep. When My Loup first opened, the restaurant lost over a pound of caviar overnight after a cleaning company accidentally unplugged its refrigerator. Shusman replaced it free of charge.
“I could’ve been lying, but he didn’t ask any questions. It was big for us as a new business,” Kemp said.
Provenance’s October 2024 caviar course, which included Caledonian Blue Prawn, oyster with sweet potato mousseline, and CaviarXS’ golden osetra caviar. Chef-owner Nich Bazik said he spends between $2,000 and $4,000 a week on caviar at the restaurant.
That loyalty boosts sales. Provenance goes through roughly a kilo of golden osetra eggs a week for its caviar course. In the fall, Bazik spooned it atop a whippedtofu mousse that enclosed a firm block of a sweet potato-and-licorice powder custard. Puffs of sorghum sat contrasted with the fish eggs, Bazik said, giving each bite a simultaneous crunch and pop.
The dish was inspired by things Bazik’s 4-year-old son eats (minus the caviar). Provenance pays roughly $2,000 a week — or $8,000 a month — for the fish eggs alone.
“The amount of money we spend on caviar for that one dish isn’t the best business decision I’ve ever made,” Bazik said. “But I keep doing it because it’s Gary. It comes with generosity.”
We’ll show you a photo taken in the Philly-area, you drop a pin where you think it was taken. Closer to the location results in a better score. This week’s theme is all about Christmas. Good luck!
Round #12
Question 1
Where can you find this Christmas tree?
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ClickTap on map to guess the location in the photo
ClickTap again to change your guess and hit submit when you're happy
You will be scored at the end. The closer to the location the better the score
Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Pretty good/Not bad/Way off! Your guess was from the location.Spot on! Your guess was exactly at the location. Here's also where a random selection of Inquirer readers guessed.
The tree is in the old waiting room at 30th Street Station. It was placed in front of the 30-foot frieze, “The Spirit of Transportation”, which depicts travel from ancient to modern and futuristic times.
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Question 2
Where are these people?
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Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Pretty good/Not bad/Way off! Your guess was from the location.Spot on! Your guess was exactly at the location. Here's also where a random selection of Inquirer readers guessed.
This is the Betsy Ross House in Old City decked out in Christmas decorations.
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Question 3
Where is this Grinch family?
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Joe Lamberti / For The Inquirer
Pretty good/Not bad/Way off! Your guess was from the location.Spot on! Your guess was exactly at the location. Here's also where a random selection of Inquirer readers guessed.
This is the Christmas Village on the north side of City Hall. The event will take place from Thanksgiving Day through Christmas Eve this year, featuring more than 120 vendors offering holiday merchandise and seasonal food.
Your Score
ARank
Amazing work. You are the head elf!
BRank
Good stuff. You've earned a spot on Santa’s nice list this year!
CRank
C is a passing grade. Do you like Christmas?You’ve shown some Grinch-like tendencies.
DRank
D isn’t great. Did Santa get stuck in the chimney while delivering knowledge to you?
FRank
We don’t want to say you failed, but you didn’t not fail.
You beat % of other Inquirer readers.
We’ll be back next Saturday for another round of Citywide Quest.
The buyers: Casie Girvin, 30, performer and voice teacher; Steve Crino, 32, musician
The house: A 984-square-foot rowhouse in Point Breeze with three bedrooms and one bath, built in 1923.
The price: Listed and purchased for $305,000
The agent: Benjamin Camp, Elfant Wissahickon
The ask: For Casey Girvin and Steve Crino, the home-buying journey began long before they opened Zillow. “We always knew that we wanted to be homeowners,” said Girvin. “It’s something we were saving for a long time.”
Both musicians, they spent years learning what did and did not work for their lifestyles. They started in a one-bedroom, which didn’t work because their practice sessions often overlapped, creating a cacophony of noise. Eventually, they moved into a bi-level apartment where they had room to work.
That experience shaped their home-buying wish list. That meant they needed at least three bedrooms — one for sleeping and two for music studios — and a layout that let two musicians practice without driving each other mad. “We needed it to be either like a bi-level space, or we needed a buffer room between the two of us,” Girvin said.
They also wanted a backyard. “We learned during COVID that having an outdoor space was really important to us,” she added. So was being close to the Broad Street SEPTA line. Fixer-uppers were a nonstarter.
Upon entering the house, the couple immediately fell in love with the staircase, especially its architectural detailing.
The search: The couple intentionally waited until winter to search, hoping for lower prices. They saw 21 houses in Point Breeze and liked a lot of what they saw, but tried to be ruthless when it came to making an offer. “That was a very informative part of the process, Crino said, “because when you’re contemplating actually putting an offer down, your preferences emerge.”
They ended up making only one other offer on a house they nicknamed “the Grandma house” because of its funky carpeting and wallpaper. The seller verbally accepted it but eventually pulled it from the market.
“Ultimately, we’re happy with what happened,” said Girvin.
Girvin and Crino love all the natural light pouring through the living room windows.
The appeal: Girvin had a good feeling about the house when she saw it online. “I was like, ‘Wow, that looks exactly like where we want to be, at a price point that was quite exciting,’” she said. Even better, it had central air, beautiful hardwood floors, and matched the couple’s aesthetic. But the couple panicked when they saw an open house the next day. They called their agent and secured a same-day viewing.
Inside, the house aligned almost perfectly with what they had been searching for. What they weren’t expecting, though, were interesting artistic details, like the sunflower etched into the banister and the mural in the backyard. They loved the staircase, the amount of natural light pouring through the living room windows, and the view from their bedroom window of a church they admired. “The house is on a nice, little, cute side street,” Cirsi said. And crucially: “It’s so close to the subway.”
The second floorsealed the deal. The layout was perfect: a bathroom between the two smaller bedrooms. A built-in sound buffer for their future studios. “Most Philly rowhomes, you go up the stairs, it’s like a bathroom right at the top, and then the three bedrooms in a row,” Girvin explained. “But this one has bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, bedroom. That was ultimately one of the main reasons we bought the house.”
Crino’s studio is separated from Girvin’s by a bathroom, allowing the couple to practice music at the same time without disrupting each other.
The deal: The couple made an offer that evening. They offered the listing price — $305,000. “We felt that the house was worth what it was asking,” Girvin said. The sellers accepted right away.
The inspection revealed two issues. First, the oven needed to be replaced. The sellers issued the couple a credit to buy a new one.
The bigger issue was the HVAC system. The breaker tripped during the inspection. “We watched it go boop,” Crino said. The fix required electrical work, and they insisted it be completed and certified before closing. “That was the right decision because it definitely was pricier than they thought it was going to be,” Crino said.
The money: Girvin and Crino had been saving for almost a decade. Every month, they set aside a portion of their earnings in a separate account. They also had money saved for a wedding that they decided to put toward their house instead. “At one point we thought about having a really big wedding,” Girvin said, “but we decided to do the whole micro wedding, DIY backyard thing.”
The small side street the couple lives on was no sweat for their movers, Old City Moving Co.
Between their life savings and the wedding savings, plus generous gifts from wedding guests, Girvin and Crino had “$80,000-ish” to spend. They put 20% down, which was $61,000, and spent the rest on closing costs, which were $27,000. “That was the $80K right there,” Girvin said. Their mortgage is a little less than $1,800, which is exactly what they had been paying in rent.
The move: The couple moved in mid-March, one month after they closed. “Moving was relatively painless,” Girvin said. “We hired Old City Moving Co., and they were really great.” They navigated getting a giant moving truck down a tiny side street like pros, backing in so that they could get out more easily.
Any reservations? None worth mentioning. The only thing they’d add is a second bathroom — another half bath someday, maybe in the basement. But that feels like a future luxury, not a present problem. “Most days we’re like, I love this house,” Girvin said.
Girvin and Crino purchased a new oven with help from a seller’s credit.
Life after close: Their first major purchase was a new oven. “When people come to the house, I’m like, ‘You know, we bought that oven,’” Crino said, laughing. Decorating has been slow and thoughtful. The most sentimental change is the three-teardrop lamp from Steve’s grandmother, now hanging from their ceiling — something they never would have installed in a rental. The backyard is next.
This Wagyu hot dog is one of the finest bar food snacks in the city. Well, it’s a snack if you share it with a friend as I did. A remarkably juicy dog on a pillowy bun, slicked with tonkatsu sauce and dusted with great handfuls of shredded katsuobushi (bonito flakes) and nori, it’s the perfect thing to soak up the booze from one of Almanac’s complex cocktails. Almanac, 310 Market St. Second Floor, 215-238-5757, almanacphilly.com
— Kiki Aranita
Smoked pumpkin tortellini with lobster, leeks, and fennel-tarragon butter at Southwark.
Smoked pumpkin tortellini with lobster at Southwark
I had my best meal in years the other night at Southwark, the Queen Village standby riding a fresh gust of momentum from its recent recommendation by the Michelin Guide. The bar’s Queen of Cups cocktail was a cold-slayer supreme — a steaming hot toddy variation with Jameson whiskey, spiced apple syrup, and a gloss of brown butter floating atop this lemony brew served in a vintage tea cup. The thick Stone Arch pork chop with charred cabbages was impressively moist, and a hearty white ragù with ground pheasant and chestnuts was the most interesting Bolognese I’ve eaten all year.
But the star of the show was a delicate appetizer featuring tender nuggets of lobster, braised leeks, and tortellini stuffed with smoked Marina di Chiogga pumpkins pureed with mascarpone and brown butter. I’ve seen that pairing of lobster and leeks elsewhere around town lately (a real beauty at My Loup) but that extra wisp of applewood smoke in those dumplings, tossed in fennel-tarragon butter, gave this elegant dish a welcome rustic edge. The impressive pasta craft of those tortellini was also a nice reminder that chef Chris D’Ambro and Marina De Oliveira’s other newly Michelin-recommended restaurant, Ambra, shares a kitchen with Southwark for alta cucina dinners right next door. Southwark, 701 S. 4th St., 267-930-8538, southwarkrestaurantphilly.com
— Craig LaBan
Egg chicken 65 at Amma’s, 1500 Walnut St., Philadelphia.
Egg chicken 65 at Amma’s South Indian Cuisine Center City
Chicken 65 — the fiery South Indian snack that traces back to Hotel Buhari in Chennai in 1965 — gets a luxurious spin at the sumptuously appointed, newly relocated Center City location of Amma’s South Indian Cuisine. (It’s in the former Max Brenner space on 15th Street, just below Walnut.) The dish starts with pieces of chicken marinated with red chilis, ginger, garlic, curry leaves, and other spices. After a dip in the deep fryer, it gets topped with soft-scrambled eggs. The crispy heat and crunch from the chicken and the richness of the silky, fluffy eggs provide a pleasing balance. This variation is available only at the Center City location. Amma’s South Indian Cuisine, 1500 Walnut St., 808-762-6627, ammasrestaurants.com
