Updated Friday, April 22, 2022 at 5:25 p.m.
The parents of late Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Dwayne Haskins Jr. said in a statement that they will not attend funeral services for their son, which were held this morning in Pittsburgh. They will attend for two other memorials set for this weekend.
In a brief statement, Dwayne Haskins Sr. and Tamara Haskins said they hadn’t previously met Haskins’ wife, Kalabrya, “and we didn’t want our son’s funeral service to be the place we met her for the first time.”
The Haskins had previously announced memorial services in New Jersey, where Dwayne Jr. was born and Maryland, where he attended high school, while the Steelers had released information about a “celebration of life” at Allegheny Center Alliance Church in Pittsburgh scheduled for today, with a visitation to begin at 10 a.m. and services to follow at 11 a.m. It was unclear before now whether there had been coordination between Haskins’ wife, his parents and the team on the various services and no details have been released about Haskins’ final resting place.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Friday afternoon that Haskins’ casket was being transported to New Jersey ahead of Saturday’s service.
Haskins was tragically killed just after 6 a.m. on April 9, when he was struck by a dump truck as he walked on a stretch of Interstate 595 near Fort Lauderdale. He was 24.
The circumstances of how he came to walk along the highway remain unclear, although 911 recordings released earlier this week revealed that Kalabrya called emergency dispatchers from Pittsburgh after her husband told her he had run out of gas and then stopped responding to her phone calls. In another call, a woman cries as she tells a dispatcher that she just saw a man being hit by a vehicle on the same highway.