Family found dead in apartment grew isolated weeks before grisly discovery

PHILADELPHIA – Walidah Campbell knew something was wrong when her niece didn’t return her “Happy Birthday” text on Feb. 11. Naa’Irah Smith wasn’t like that, Campbell explained Wednesday. She always kept in close contact with her family.

Unbeknownst to Campbell, 800 miles away in Georgia, the silence was an early-warning sign of a sharp change in behavior for Smith and Campbell’s two older sisters, Shana Decree and Jamilla Campbell.

In the last month, the women seemingly retreated into a cramped unit in the Robert Morris Apartments in Morrisville, pulling their children out of school and isolating themselves from the outside world, according to relatives and others who struggled to reach them.

The brief conversations that did emerge were troubling, relatives said, exchanges peppered with bizarre imagery of demons and “pearly gates.”

“I really wish I could ask my sister what happened,” Walidah Campbell said. “Naa’Irah’s fiance was concerned, the children’s fathers were concerned. It all happened so fast.”

The seclusion was shattered late Monday, when a caseworker from Bucks County Children and Youth discovered five members of the family dead inside the apartment: Jamilla Campbell, 42, and her 9-year-old twin daughters Imani and Erika, along with two of Decree’s children, Smith, 25, and Damon Decree Jr., 13, according to investigators.

Decree, 45, and her daughter Dominique, 19, were there as well, reportedly lying “disoriented” in a bedroom down the hallway from the corpses, authorities said.

The two women told police that “everyone at the apartment … wanted to die,” and confessed to choking some of their own relatives, according to court documents. They each face five counts of criminal homicide and conspiracy and remain in the county jail without bail.

Authorities, who continue to investigate, said they knew of no motive for the quintuple murder, a crime that Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub called an “unspeakable tragedy.”

For the family, the loss is staggering, the alleged crimes, unimaginable.

“Shana is such a good-hearted woman,” Walidah Campbell said. “I don’t understand how she went from that to this. What we’re seeing here isn’t her.”

Campbell and her extended family tried for two weeks to contact her sisters and their children, a group of eight who had been living together in the apartment for about a month. The crowding together confused her.

Decree and her two younger children had been living there for some time, but Smith had her own home, Campbell said, as did Jamilla Campbell, one where she lived with her twin daughters and teenage son.

Questions about the living situation went unanswered, she said — even her father, James, couldn’t get the family to answer the door when he stopped by the apartment, concerned.

At his home in Trenton, N.J., on Wednesday, James Campbell declined to talk about the murders or the guarded silence that preceded them, telling a reporter he had “nothing to say.”

The only contact Walidah Campbell had with the family in the last month came through an aunt who had been in touch with them. She said they told her they were afraid to leave their home because of the “demons” they saw all around them, Campbell said.

“This is not normal for them. They were all very sweet, intelligent people,” she said. “I think it was something they got into, something that took over them.”

Morrisville Police Chief George McClay said Wednesday that his officers “had no indication” that fringe religious beliefs played any role in the murders. He stressed that the investigation was still in its early stages and that authorities are waiting for the results of autopsies to determine how each of the five victims died.

McClay noted that Dominique Decree was taken into custody with “very superficial” cuts to her neck. They appeared to have been recently self-inflicted and were still bleeding when she was taken into custody, he said.

Before the grisly discovery on Monday, Morrisville police had little contact with the family, other than a few minor calls for disturbances at the apartment, he said.

But the family had attracted the attention of Bucks County Children and Youth, a socialservices organization. The caseworker who stumbled upon the bodies had visited the apartment on Feb. 5, and had tried, unsuccessfully, to contact the family again on Saturday.

Sources familiar with the investigation said the case worker was sent to check on the family at the request of officials at Morrisville Junior/Senior High School. The school’s principal called the agency on Feb. 1 after Damon Decree Jr. had been absent for several days and his mother did not return officials’ calls.

Police said Jamillia Campbell’s daughters, Imani and Erika, were registered for school in Trenton, but had not been attending in recent weeks.