Trying to grab row from MySQL with PHP in custom functions

Question

What I'm trying to do is make a series of functions within classes that will make it easier to quickly carry out common tasks. In this instance I'm trying to create a Database class that has different functions eg connect, findRow.

I keep getting this error though when trying to call the findRow function: Fatal error: Call to a member function fetch_row() on a non-object

class Database {

public $host = "";
public $username = "";
public $password = "";
public $database = "";
public $db_connect;

/**
*   Connect to database
*/
function connect($host, $username, $password) {

        $connection = new mysqli($host,$username,$password);

        if($connection->connect_errno > 0){
            die('Unable to connect to database [' . $connection->connect_error . ']');
        } else {
            $this->db_connect = $connection;
            return true;
        }

}


/**
*   Pulls an entire row from search by Table > Column > Value
*/
function findRow($table,$column,$value) {

    echo $query = "SELECT * FROM ".$table." WHERE ".$column."='".$value."'";

    $result = $this->db_connect->query($query);
    echo $result;
    $row = $result->fetch_row();

    return $row;

}