Three months after disappearing from his West Philadelphia neighborhood, Alexander Fitzgerald is still missing

In the last three months, Claudia Fitzgerald has celebrated the arrival of a grandson, even as she’s agonized over the disappearance of her own son.

“It’s been bittersweet,” she said.

Claudia’s adult son, Alexander Fitzgerald, disappeared while she was at the hospital with her daughter, who was giving birth to her first grandchild.

A neighbor told police that on June 21, he spotted Alexander, 33, a Black man who is 6-foot-1 and weighs 180 pounds, walking near the 7200 block of Haverford Avenue in West Philadelphia with two Black men who the neighbor did not recognize.

Alexander hasn’t been heard from since.

When I wrote about Alexander’s disappearance earlier this summer, I hoped that by the time that column was published, he’d have found his way back home.

But then one month turned into two, and now nearly three, with no trace of him while his mother prays for the best — and fears the worst.

“I’m trying to remain hopeful,” she told me when we spoke this week. “At this point, I just need to know something.”

Fitzgerald said she had been worried the minute she got home that June day and saw that the door of the home they shared was slightly ajar with her son’s key still in the lock.

The police officer who came to her home a couple of days later to take the initial report told her that underage children are the priority when it comes to missing person cases. While she could understand that, she told him there were reasons to worry about her grown son.

Alexander was on medication for mental health issues that were first diagnosed as an adolescent. He stuck to a routine that included going to a nearby gym and then coming home, and always picking up his phone when his mother called. And he was “trusting, sometimes too trusting” of strangers, she said.

When the detective first assigned to the case came up empty, she hired Greg Singleton, a retired Philadelphia homicide detective turned private investigator who has worked his share of missing person cases, and who knew that the disappearances of people of color usually didn’t garner much media attention.

White people usually get more media attention, especially a missing white woman. A missing Black man, not so much.

Singleton peppered the area where Alexander Fitzgerald was last seen with missing posters, secured surveillance video, visited and revisited friends and neighbors, and searched for him all over the city.

But he’s come up empty.

“No sign, no trace,” Singleton said.

There have been a few new developments, Singleton told me. Phone records pulled by police, who are still actively investigating the case, showed that his cell phone was last used on June 24, three days after he went missing, somewhere around Belmont Avenue near Fairmount Park.

Police plan to look at his bank records to see if there has been any activity on his accounts. They’ve also entered him into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database, a federally funded agency that acts as a clearinghouse for information about missing persons.

But Alexander’s case remains one of more than 400 active missing person cases in the city this year.

“It’s not what you want to hear,” Singleton said.

Both Singleton and Claudia Fitzgerald are in communication with a new detective who’s been assigned to the case, and while she’s grateful, she also can’t help but wonder if they would be farther along if she felt police had prioritized his disappearance earlier.

“Every day I wake up hoping that he’ll walk up the path, knock on the door, and be back home,” she said. “I’m hopeful every day. I haven’t lost hope.”

In the meantime, the retired School District employee finds solace in spending time with her grandson.

It is unimaginable now, she told me, that she wasn’t sure how she’d feel about becoming a grandmother. Unimaginable once, too, is how her life could be simultaneously filled with so much joy and such agonizing pain.