Bad seed, yet again

James Barron and Al (Russell's son) Baker have a saddening article in The New York Times:

As a single mother in a terrible job market, Leisa Jones had been doing everything she could to hold things together, working part time as a department store security guard during the holidays and, more recently, attending beauty school. Her neighbors said she had made the second-floor apartment on Staten Island where she lived with her four children— two boys and two girls— a place where good manners and good behavior mattered.
After firefighters had picked through the ruins of what they initially believed had been an early-morning fire that killed Ms. Jones and all four children, they uncovered evidence that was even more troubling: Ms. Jones’s oldest child, C. J. Jones, 14, had apparently started the blaze after slitting his sisters’ throats. Then, investigators said, he slit his own.
“It ranks up there in some of the more heinous acts we’ve seen,” said a longtime Fire Department investigator, who insisted on anonymity because the investigation was continuing. “It’s pretty horrific.”
The slash wounds on the three bodies were discovered as investigators worked their way through the charred remains of the house, where four families lived, on Nicholas Avenue in the Port Richmond section, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. Investigators found Ms. Jones’s body and the bodies of the two girls— Brittney, 10, and Melonie, 7— in the living room. C. J.’s body was close by, slumped over a bed in a back bedroom. A straight razor was under his arm. His two-year-old brother, Jermaine Sinclair, had been rushed out by a Fire Department lieutenant who pushed his way into the apartment. Jermaine’s throat had not been cut, an investigator said, but he did not survive.
The longtime fire investigator said that a murder-suicide was “the most viable” explanation, but that a final determination would not be made until the investigation was complete and autopsies had been conducted. But one thing was clear, he and other officials said: the blaze was no accident. He said investigators had ruled out “all possible accidental sources of ignition. That fire was intentionally set,” he said.
As investigators tried to make sense of a narrative very different from the one they first believed they were piecing together, they learned that workers with the Parks Department had ejected C. J. from a Port Richmond pool on Wednesday “for lighting a fire there”, Mr. Browne said. He could not characterize the nature or size of that blaze.
Neighbors told investigators they had seen C. J. start fires outside the house on Nicholas Avenue last weekend and again on Wednesday. Mr. Browne said C. J. had been “lighting papers”. One law enforcement official said C. J. had also been suspended recently for assaulting an assistant principal at his school, Intermediate School 72.
“I’m just stunned,” said Shannon Barback, 37, who lives in an adjoining apartment. “I don’t know what to think.” Ms. Barback said other people in the neighborhood had talked about seeing C. J. playing with matches. But she said he did not seem angry.
“There was never any conflict,” said Jacqueline Brooks, who runs the day care program the youngest children attended. “We had no incidents at all. The girls came in happy; the baby was healthy.” Ms. Brooks said Ms. Jones had called her on Monday and asked if she would pick up Brittney at school because C. J. had been suspended and Ms. Jones had to go to I.S. 72. Ms. Jones did not say why her son was in trouble and did not indicate that anything else was wrong, Ms. Brooks said.
Nicholas Cotton, who lives with Ms. Barback on the second floor, said he had seen the Joneses on Wednesday night, hours before the fire. “They were sitting out front, like they do every night, trying to avoid the heat,” he said. “They were playing, kids being kids, Mom watching them.”
Keoma Distan, 23, Ms. Brooks’s daughter and a worker in the day care program, said that Ms. Jones “was talking to us about how much her kids help her out.” She said they were always together, running errands.
Neighbors said they were awakened shortly after 4 a.m. on Thursday by people shouting from the street that the building was on fire. They said that the windows of the burning apartment were lit up by flames, and that the fire soon spread to the roof.
The police said two officers on patrol in the neighborhood smelled smoke and tracked down the fire at 4:10 a.m., alerting the Fire Department by radio. Someone on the street called 911 at 4:13 a.m., officials said, and the first of 140 firefighters began arriving within four minutes.
By then, the two police officers had tried to enter the burning apartment but had turned back because of heavy smoke and flames in a doorway at the top of an inside stairway leading to the Joneses’ apartment. The firefighters trained a hose on the landing, and when the flames died down for a moment, Lieutenant Robert Strafer, a 29-year veteran of the Fire Department who is with Ladder Company 80, burst in. Lieutenant Strafer found Jermaine and carried him out. The boy died at Richmond University Medical Center.
Ms. Brooks, at the day care center, said she had had a “motherly talk” with C. J. on Monday after he was suspended from school. She said she had told him, “You’ve got to behave better. You’re the man of the house.”