Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Murder victim recalled
Kevin Paul Jalbert had ‘a kind spirit and a large smile’
WEST CHESTER >> Kevin Paul Jalbert may have died alone in Paoli Hospital after being shot by a stranger on the streets of Coatesville, as prosecutors said during the trial of his assailant last week, but he was not forgotten.
Throughout the five-day long trial, and even in the days before, the woman who described herself as Jalbert’s girlfriend sat in the courtroom and listened to testimony about how the man she remembered as kind, generous and adventurous was killed in an angry confrontation with teenagers and young men he did not know.
“He always bought Egg McMuffins at McDonald’s and gave them to homeless people on the street,” Shannon Hayes said of the man she met through mutual friends at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where he had been stationed in the U.S. Air Force and later worked as a civilian employee.
“He was just that kind of person,” said Hayes in an interview
during a break in the trial of Sheron Jalen “Ryda” Purnell, the Coatesville man who was found guilty of third-degree murder in Jalbert’s death by a Common Pleas Court jury on Friday. “He as a very generous person, with a kind spirit and a large smile.
Hayes said Jalbert had lived in the city for less than a month, during his treatment at the Coatesville Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Caln, where he was receiving treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and physical problems suffered from his days in the military.
According to testimony during the homicide trial before Judge David Bortner, Jalbert was walking home to an apartment he shared with another veteran around 6:15 p.m. on Oct. 3, 2016, when he encountered a group of teenagers playing in the street near the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Belmont Street in the center of Coatesville, just south of East Lincoln Highway.
He apparently shouted at the children to stop playing and go home, because there were no parents to watch out for them. The group exchanged words, and Jalbert
became angry. That encounter was noticed by a group of about eight young men who were on Belmont and one, identified at the trial as Purnell, told Jalbert to leave them alone and walk away. Jalbert — who had been drinking at the nearby Midway Bar — replied with a racial slur.
Purnell left the scene, went to a nearby house, retrieved a handgun, and returned to the area after Jalbert and the group continued their encounter on White Alley. Jalbert was warned by a neighbor to leave and not mess with the men, who formed a street gang known as “the Belmont Boys.” Turning to go, Jalbert bumped into Purnell, and began fighting with the group.
Eyewitness later told police that Purnell pulled the handgun from his pants, pointed it with two hands at Jalbert – who backed up with hands raised in submission – and fired six
shots into the 36-year-old’s torso. As the wounded man turned to run, prosecutors contend, Purnell fired two more shots into his back.
Jalbert stumbled back to Belmont Street and collapsed along the curb. He was taken by ambulance to Paoli Hospital, where doctors tried, but ultimately failed, to save his life.
Jurors at the trial were shown a photo of Jalbert taken by police as he lay on the grass on Belmont Street after the shooting. But it was a different photo of him that Hayes, a 38-yearold substitute teacher who traveled back and forth from Rehoboth Beach, Del., to attend the trial, remembered during the interview.
Winter was in the air and snow was on the ground. Jalbert, Hayes said, loved to make intricately designed sculptures in the snow, including one she remembered of Elvis Presley. That day, Hayes said, she happened to look out of the window of the home she and Jalbert shared to see him crouched down, working with a young neighborhood boy, showing him not only how to build a snowman.
But, she said, also how to keep his hands and fingers warm in the process by blowing warm breath on them and rubbing them together. Hayes grabbed her cellphone and snapped a shot of the touching scene.
“It is my favorite picture of all time,” she said. “I still have it. He was just that way.”
Purnell’s trial ended with the jury’s guilty verdict around 4:45 p.m. Friday, following closing arguments by Assistant District Attorney Christopher Miller, who prosecuted the case with his colleagues, Assistant District Attorneys Caitlin Rice and Emily Provencher, and Assistant Public Defender Stephen Delano, who represents Purnell.
The finding of guilt for third-degree murder by the seven women and five men
on the jury proved a rejection of Purnell’s defense was that although he had, in fact, encountered Jalbert on the street that day, he had not been the shooter, and had been walking away from the scene when the gunshots rang out.
Taking the stand in his own defense, Purnell told the jury that he had left the confrontation between his friends and Jalbert to go to a nearby house and retrieve a charger for his cellphone. While there, he said, he drank a soda, and then left though the back door just as the shooting occurred.
In his closing argument, Delano urged the jury to find his client not guilty of the charges against him, meticulously pointing to multiple inconsistencies in the identification of Purnell, mistakes about times and places made by those testifying, and what he said were outright lies that the prosecution’s witnesses had told on the stand and to police.
“This is a case with so many moving parts,” Delano said, calling the scene on Belmont and in the alley so chaotic as to provide sufficient doubt as to whether anyone could remember exactly what happened and when, let alone identify Purnell as the shooter. “There is plenty of reasonable doubt.”
He suggested that the neighbor who warned Jalbert to leave the area, one of the prosecution’s key witnesses, was compromised by the desire to claim a reward in the murder when he went to police to identify the shooter as someone he knew as “Ryda,” a man he’d grown up with.
“It certainly could be someone else,” Delano said. “It is possible (the man) saw the shooter, but he is simply wrong in identifying Mr. Purnell. It’s somebody else.”
But Delano was apparently successful in persuading the jury to see the shooting not as a deliberate act of first-degree murder, but a reckless act that occurred in a heated exchange. “This is less than first-degree murder,” he said. “This is third-degree murder.”
In his closing, Miller pointed to the fear that was on display by the eyewitnesses, three of whom tried to recant their statements to police that they had seen Purnell fire the shots that killed Jalbert. That testimony, however, was undercut by the video-recorded statements they had given to city police and Chester County Detectives who investigated the murder.
Miller noted that the witnesses had been consistent in their identifications, including two who picked Purnell’s photo out of a line up. “This was not some random person,” who fired the shots, he said. “It was Ryda.”
The prosecutor went over the testimony of the neighbor, whose name is being withheld by the Daily Local News because of police reports that he was targeted by associates of Purnell for retaliation. On the witness stand, the man denied ever seeing Purnell at the scene, or remembering telling police that he did.
“I had to pull that story out of him, piece by piece,” Miller said. In the end, the man admitted that what he had told police about seeing Purnell fire the shots was accurate. “He didn’t lie about hat he saw. He wasn’t going to blame someone else.”
In a dramatic finish to his argument, Miller lined the shell casings that police found at the scene the day of Jalbert’s murder, displaying one after the other until there were eight in all. He reminded the jury that the final two bullets had been fired as Jalbert turned to run away.
“Those were the shots that the defendant fired into Kevin Jalbert’s back,” he said as those in the courtroom listened silently, including Hayes. “Don’t turn yours on him.”
Purnell, 24, of Coatesville, will be sentenced at a later date. he remains in Chester County Prison without bail.