Leisa Jones was born in Jamaica and had her eldest child, C J Raymond, at sixteen. She emigrated with her family to Washington DC while he was still an infant, leaving him behind for nearly two years while she arranged his entry to the United States. He was born with a heart problem and was often ill; she organised the surgery he needed in Washington and only told her relatives after it was over. A cousin described her as independent.
She was evicted for non-payment from her home in Washington in 2008, and was homeless for a short period without her blood relatives knowing. By 2010 she was living on Nicholas Avenue in Port Richmond, on Staten Island, and was in debt to her landlord there. She was attending beauty school in St George. Her last work had been in January, as a holiday-season security guard at Macy's in the Staten Island Mall, and it is not clear whether she worked after that. She fed her children partly from the by-appointment food pantry at Faith United Methodist Church.
Before daybreak on July 22, 2010 she cut the throats of three of the four children in the flat: C J Raymond, fourteen; Brittney Jones, ten; and Melonie Jones, seven. She set the place on fire. Emergency crews pulled her and the three children from the burning second floor. The youngest, Jermaine Sinclair Jr, two, was rescued alive and died later of smoke inhalation. The children were presumably asleep when it began.
What happened next is the part of this case that should not be lost. Police ruled out an intruder and then theorised that C J had killed his siblings, set the fire and cut his own throat. They only turned to his mother after finding what they took to be her note among the debris, charred, with the words am sorry still legible. The medical examiner ruled her death, from smoke inhalation, a suicide, and C J's a homicide. Both she and the boy had taken pills of some kind, which had not killed them.
The family afterwards declined to talk about her character, and said why. A cousin wrote that they would withhold comment so that investigators could reach a factual conclusion on the physical evidence, because comments on C J's personality and boyish antics had caused him to be wrongfully accused.
Accounts of her differ. She was described as devoted and exacting, keeping the children neatly dressed and insisting on polite manners, and also as harsh and hot-tempered. Social workers at C J's school had been concerned about the family and had seen her being verbally or emotionally abusive towards him. His father, in Jamaica, said he had left her because of her temper, and that C J had asked about coming to live with him. He also told a newspaper that a close friend of hers telephoned him after the deaths to say she had earlier admitted planning to kill the children and burn the house down.
Relatives said Brittney liked to write, colour and draw, and that Melonie liked to dance. Neighbours said the family was always together, on bicycles and drinking apple juice on the stoop.
About two thousand Americans a year die in murder-suicides. The perpetrator is usually a man; about seventy per cent of cases involve couples and about six per cent involve infants and children. Dr Donna Cohen, of the University of South Florida, who has studied thousands of them, was asked about this case. She said that a person with a mental illness in these circumstances has an intense attachment to the victims and feels that the relationship is about to change, and that the motivation is that nobody else can take care of them. Her judgment, from what was known, was that this mother felt unable to provide for her children and would rather see them dead than watch their world fall apart, and that to her that was love.
Her age is given as thirty in the contemporary reporting; the roster has carried thirty-two.
This is a single act, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification.