20 years and counting: For Tina Marie (2024)

LOCKPORT — It has been a long and difficult journey for the Boyer family the past 20 years.

The close-knit family weathered a tragedy with the murder of Tina Boyer in 2004 at the hands of her ex-boyfriend.

“We were all very close back then,” Tina’s sister Tera Tillotson said. “Her death kind of put a dent in a lot of the closeness and some of us had faded away. Some of us are more close than others.”

Two decades later, the family experienced another loss with the death of their matriarch, Debbie.

“When our mom died last year, I think it took another toll on us and kind of separated some of us,” Amy Boyer said.

Despite the losses, members of the Boyer family have been devoted to advocating for survivors of domestic violence and their families.

Tillotson and Boyer recall Tina, their oldest sister, as someone who always put her family first.

“She was all about her nephews,” Tillotson said. “I’m the baby of the family so she spoiled me too.”

“She just liked hanging out with her nephews, my two sons,” Boyer added. “And then my other brother had two children at the same time, so she had four nephews. She watched mine a lot while I was working on weekends and stuff.”

On Aug. 4, 2004, their lives were changed forever.

Boyer remembers receiving a phone call from Tillotson, who told her that Tina had been found stabbed and strangled in her Washburn Street residence.

“So at 2 a.m. I’m waking up my kids who are five and younger, putting them in the car and going down to my family’s house where they all were. And then just a shock of how we found her, all the police being around there and stuff like that,” Boyer said.

Unbeknownst to Tillotson, she had seen her sister’s killer as she was leaving her house next door, on the same day Tina died.

“I actually had seen Rodney (Davis) right there and he had a conversation with me, and I just remember the smirk on his face, and my sister had already been dead all day long, and he just acted like everything was normal,” Tillotson recalled.

When Tillotson returned home later that night, she was greeted by the sight of police surrounding her sister’s apartment.

While the sisters had witnessed drug-induced outbursts from Davis towards Tina during their on-and-off relationship over an 11-year period, her death at his hands took them by surprise.

“I remember he would always fight with her. There’s times that I walked in the house and he’s like, ‘I’m going to kill you’ and stuff like that...but there’s days when he wasn’t doing drugs and he was perfectly fine, got along with everybody and I trusted him with my kids while I went to work and school,” Boyer said.

During the trial process in Tina’s murder case, the family was connected to the YWCA of the Niagara Frontier through Victims Assistance at the Niagara County Sheriff’s Office.

The following year, Debbie Boyer began to raise money in memory of her late daughter through a Walmart employees bowling league, where she and Tina both worked, to raise awareness and provide support to victims of domestic violence.

Last year, the Boyer family raised more than $3,000 through a basket raffle. To date they have raised approximately $30,000. The money collected over the years has been donated to the YWCA to support survivors of domestic violence.

Mary Brennan-Taylor, YWCA vice president of programs, recalled first meeting Debbie during her first fundraising effort in the summer of 2005.

“It was so somber, and it was just really quite emotional to meet with the mother of a homicide victim and here she’s thinking about people other than herself and her family,” Brennan-Taylor said.

At the time, Brennan-Taylor did not anticipate that would be only the first in a series of fundraisers over the years that included cell phone drives and collecting “Pennies From Heaven” outside Lockport Walmart.

“She was thinking about the future victims and what could have happened if that family had known, if Tina had known, about our resources,” Brennan-Taylor said.

The Boyer family faced another devastating loss with Debbie’s death last year. Despite their matriarch’s passing, some of them have seen the importance of keeping up their annual fundraiser. It’s about keeping both Tina’s and Debbie’s memory alive.

“I’ve always been involved in some way in community service and paying it forward. So when (Debbie) died I’m like, ‘We have to find something to still keep their memory alive,’” Boyer said.

This year, the family hopes to double their 2023 fundraising total with another basket raffle at the UAW Local 686 hall, 524 Walnut St., from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday.

COMING TUESDAY

The next article in this “20 Years and Counting” series will detail the court case that brought Tina Boyer’s murderer to justice and how domestic violence cases have been handled in the legal system since then.

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