D’Zondria Wallace, 30, and her two children, La’Porsha, 14, and Ja’Corbie, 11, recently moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, hoping for a new start.
She’d broken off a relationship with her abusive boyfriend, TeKeith Syvone Jones, 26, after relaying concerns to her family about his increasingly violent behavior.
A neighbor’s security camera caught Jones peeking through the window of Wallace’s new apartment Saturday afternoon, about 30 minutes before the bodies were discovered.
Wallace had told relatives she was two months pregnant with Jones’ baby, the Star Tribune reported.
“She was fearing for her life,” her mother, Mary Wallace told the Star Tribune. She reportedly began seeing someone else in mid-January. “He was jealous.”
A nephew later told police that Jones continued to come by the house even after the breakup and always carried a semiautomatic handgun, according to the Star Tribune.
The nephew recalled an incident in December when Jones broke in through a kitchen window, “swung her around,” and accused her of seeing another man.
The next morning he fired a pistol at Wallace but missed. She never reported the incident to police.
On Saturday afternoon, a relative entered Wallace’s apartment on the 700 block of Jessie Street and saw “blood everywhere.”
Just inside the door, first responders found Wallace’s teenage daughter, La’Porsha, mortally wounded on the floor. She had been shot 10 times.
Her mother lay dead on the sofa. She had been shot twice.
Medics found Ja’Corbie suffering from gunshot wounds. When they asked him who shot them, he responded: “Keith.”
Ja’Corbie died hours later at a hospital.
A dying declaration is a statement made by someone with their dying breath. A dying declaration can be introduced in court as evidence in a murder trial. It holds as much weight as if the deceased complainant pointed out the defendant in the courtroom.
“I know that Ja’Corbie fought to stay alive to say it was his mom’s boyfriend,” said Wallace’s cousin Jeanette Whitehall, who helped raise the kids for a year before Wallace could relocate to Minnesota.
“Now Coby can rest,” Whitehall added.
