Faybe Norman’s street is lined with well-kept bungalows and manicured yards, and her extended family lives in homes within walking distance throughout the neighborhood. The vibrant green, sprawling Foster Park is a few blocks away.
When drivers and pedestrians pass by her home, five different faces of her grandson, Denardo “Deuce” Buford Jr., as he was growing up, look out at them from a mural on the brick sidewall. He was sitting in a car with a friend when both of them were killed in a drive-by shooting early Nov. 1, 2023, in Avalon Park, Norman said. Buford was 19. No one was charged in the shooting.
Now, Norman’s Auburn Gresham home is a memorial to her grandson’s life.
“When he left the house he said, ‘Mama, I love you, I’ll call you,’” Norman says. While she knows crime is high in her neighborhood, “I never thought it would be my grandson.”
She remembers him as an old soul who was comfortable talking to anyone, especially older generations of adults.
Norman’s daughter, Camesha Taylor, is Buford’s mother. The face of his other grandmother, who also has died, seems to gaze down from the top left corner of the wall at the growing face of their shared grandchild. She wears a necklace that reads “Deuce.”
Norman said she was partially inspired to do the mural after growing up in on the Near North Side, where she admired the murals of Lake View and Pilsen as a girl.
Buford’s father, Denardo Buford Sr., admired the mural that a friend commissioned for the entryway to his River North shop. So the family hired the same muralist, another friend from Colombia, to paint the grandmother’s home.
“The paint was so beautiful,” says Denardo Buford Sr., who lives in a home around the corner from his mother-in-law. It was a fitting tribute to his son, who he remembers as a “happy, happy person” who loved fast cars and music, especially rap.
“He was always listening to music,” his dad says.
For her grandson growing up, “the neighborhood was his family,” Norman says. He walked between his relatives’ homes and played basketball at Foster Park. His Foster Park team traveled to play at Disney World in Florida.
She says she knows of about 20 young people from Auburn Gresham recently lost to gun violence, and the next generation is choosing to settle down and raise their families elsewhere.
Since her grandson died, “everything is different,” Norman says. But she can always look to her garage, with its “image of him just being out here.”