The husband of 54-year-old Jacquelyn Smith says 2 panhandlers used a “fake baby” to lure his wife before robbing and killing her at a stop sign in East Baltimore.
Keith Smith, 52, told ABC News he and his wife wife were driving home to Maryland after celebrating his daughter, Shavon Smith’s 28th birthday in Baltimore on Friday night.
About 12:30 a.m. Saturday, Smith spotted a woman holding what appeared to be a baby and a homemade sign in the freezing rain.
Her sign read, “Please help me feed my baby,” according to Keith.
He said he hesitated to pull over, but his wife wanted to help the young mom.
“It was drizzling, it was cold, wet and my wife, like any normal person, felt sorry for the baby, which turned out not to even be a baby,” he told ABC News. “It must have been like a stuffed animal or something wrapped in a blanket. From where we were, it looked like a baby and we thought it was a baby.”
He told the Baltimore Sun his wife “felt moved to give her some money.”
After his wife handed the woman a $10 bill, a man approached the car to thank her.
“As she was handing her the money, the guy came to say ‘Thank you,’ and the woman was saying ‘God bless you. God bless you,'” Keith told ABC News. “While we’re looking at her saying ‘God bless you’ and my wife was handing her the money, he came over to the car and said, ‘Thank you’ and then he started stabbing my wife and snatched her necklace off and ran.”
In a different version of the events, Keith said that as the man and woman fled, the woman paused long enough to tell him “God bless you.”
Keith raced his injured wife to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
Police are reviewing video footage from surveillance cameras at the nearby Latrobe Homes public housing in the impoverished Johnston Square neighborhood.
Jacquelyn worked as an electrical engineer in Aberdeen, Maryland. Her co-workers remembered her as a kind person with a good heart.
Keith and Jacquelyn were married for 5 years and they have six children and three grandchildren between them.
“I just want justice for my wife,” said Keith.
