Boyfriend of slain East Hills woman sought on prior assault warrant
Tionna Banks had big dreams.
She left Auberle, the group home where she spent several years, and graduated from Westinghouse High School. She left college before her son was born in February, friends said. They said she recently applied for financial aid and planned to go back to school, and she was applying for jobs.
“She was determined to do well for her son,” friend Sara Lester said.
Those dreams ended Thursday, friends said, when Banks, 19, and her grandmother, Valorie Crumpton, 72, were found dead in Crumpton's Karl Street home in the East Hills.
“I just can't wrap my mind around it,” Lester said Friday. “She was just a good, godly person.”
Pittsburgh police Friday were looking for Banks' boyfriend on unrelated charges. Police didn't call Cesar Mazza, 25, a suspect in the killings but asked people who know where he is to contact homicide detectives. Police said he should be considered “armed and dangerous.”
Mazza is wanted for missing his trial Wednesday on charges he assaulted Banks when she was pregnant in the fall.
Police found the bodies of Banks and Crumpton when officers forced their way into the home, sent there to check on the well-being of a woman who failed to keep an appointment with a social service agency, according to Public Safety spokeswoman Sonya Toler.
Friends said Banks was staying with her grandmother, who neighbors said was pleasant and kept to herself.
“Every once in a while, I would give her a lift up the hill with her groceries,” said neighbor Audrey Fincher, 76. “We would say hi and have little conversations. She kept to herself.”
Friends said Banks' mother died when Banks was young, and when she and Crumpton butted heads, Banks went to Auberle, a group home for girls.
Cherrie Corbett, 47, worked at Auberle and was assigned to Banks' case. She said they developed a friendship.
“She wanted what all girls want — she wanted to be loved,” Corbett said. “She was typical in so many ways, but she was also her own person. She had her own thoughts and ideas.”
Younger girls at Auberle began to look up to Banks, she said: “I told her, ‘These girls are looking at you as an example.' She really took that to heart.”
Corbett said Banks' son brought her the love she was looking for. She named him Vaughn.
“She just fell in love with him. He was everything to her.”
Lester recalled “how happy she was when he was born.”
The baby is safe, police said.
Court records paint a violent portrait of Banks' relationship with Mazza, the child's father, beginning several months into her pregnancy.
“Cesar Mazza currently beats me while (I) carry a baby, also threatening to kill me and my family,” Banks wrote in a protection from abuse petition dated Oct. 7. Mazza was charged with simple assault and reckless endangerment.
He was charged again Nov. 9 with aggravated assault, aggravated assault of an unborn child, terroristic threats and stalking. Banks told police Mazza knocked her down, kicked her in the stomach and threatened her life if she did not name the child after him.
In December, Banks filed another protection from abuse petition, saying Mazza called her from jail asking her to drop the charges. “I had told Cesar to please stop calling me; I have nothing to do with him,” she wrote.
In early March, a judge issued a warrant for Mazza's arrest for violating the protection from abuse order. Banks told the court: “Cesar had told my cousin that if I don't allow him to see his son, he will shoot me in the head. Also, (he) said that if I had any other man around his son or me, he will kill me.”
Megan Guza is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. She can be reached at 412-380-8519.
