Firefighters answering a three-alarm call on Nicholas Avenue in Port Richmond, on Staten Island, early on Thursday, July 22, 2010, found the second-floor apartment gutted. The fire had started inside it and run up through the attic and roof of the two-story house. In a front room were the charred bodies of Leisa Jones and her two daughters, Brittney, ten, and Melonie, seven. Her son C.J. Raymond, fourteen, was slumped over a bed in a back bedroom. The youngest, Jermaine Sinclair Jr., two, was pulled out alive and died later that day at the hospital of smoke inhalation.
For a few hours it looked like an accident. Then the medical examiner found that the two girls and C.J. had had their throats cut. A razor lay under the boy's body. C.J. had a history of playing with fire, and investigators said so publicly: their working theory was that he had killed his sisters and brother, set the apartment alight and then cut his own throat. A neighbor, Jose Vega, said the boy was "a little loose, but he was still a good kid."
On the Friday, searching the debris, detectives found a fragment of charred paper in another room with the words "am sorry" still legible. Paul Browne, the police department's chief spokesman, said the handwriting matched a diary kept by C.J.'s mother. Autopsies found pills in the stomachs of both Leisa Jones and her son, although that was not what killed them, and for several days the department said there was still "no final determination as to who was responsible."
The medical examiner settled it. Leisa Jones had died of smoke inhalation, which meant she was alive when the fire was set, and her death was ruled a suicide. C.J. had died of a wound to the neck, and his death was ruled a homicide. The toddler's throat had not been cut. The ruling cleared the boy, and the four children's deaths were counted as killings by their mother.
Her family asked afterwards that no one comment on her character until the investigators had reached their conclusions from the physical evidence, and said why: talk about C.J.'s personality and boyish antics had led to his being wrongly accused.
She had had C.J. at sixteen. Accounts of where she came from disagree. Most reporting says she was born in Jamaica, where C.J.'s father still lived; one wire report said Trinidad. Her age at death was given as thirty by the medical examiner's office and as thirty-two in wire reports. The family had moved to Washington, D.C., while C.J. was 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, and she arranged the surgery he needed in Washington and told her relatives only when it was done. A cousin described her as independent.
In 2008 she was evicted from her Washington home for not paying the rent, and for a short time she was homeless without her own family knowing it. By 2010 she was on Nicholas Avenue, behind on the rent there too, and going to beauty school in St. George. Her last known job had been in January, as a holiday-season security guard at Macy's in the Staten Island Mall. She fed the children partly from the by-appointment food pantry at Faith United Methodist Church.
People described her two ways. She was devoted and exacting, keeping the children neatly dressed and insisting on good manners, and she was harsh and quick-tempered. Social workers at C.J.'s school had worried about the family and had seen her being verbally or emotionally abusive toward him. C.J.'s father said he had left her because of her temper and that the boy had asked about coming to live with him; he also told a newspaper that a close friend of hers had called him after the deaths to say she had once admitted planning to kill the children and burn the house down.
Relatives said Brittney liked to write, color and draw, and that Melonie liked to dance. Neighbors remembered the family as always together, out on bicycles or on the stoop drinking apple juice. At the wake five white caskets stood side by side, and only Jermaine's was open. "These were people that were beloved," said a cousin, Donald Daley.
Dr. Donna Cohen of the University of South Florida, who has studied thousands of murder-suicides, said of the case that a parent in this state typically has an intense attachment to the children and feels the relationship is about to change, and comes to believe that nobody else can care for them. Her reading, 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.