Mother of victim and suspect pleads for surrender

Jacquell Rountree and his brother Dominic had never gotten along.

Jacquell, also known as "Fray," was 31; Dominic was 29. They lived together in a house on Kershaw Street in Parkside. And they fought, often, over everything. Clothes. Bikes. The basement rooms that they occupied.

"The only time they really got along was when they were sleeping," their mother, Valerie Pickens-Rountree, who lives nearby on Girard Avenue, said Wednesday.

On Monday evening, her youngest daughter banged on her front door, shaking.

"Fray and Dominic got into it," she told her mother, "and Dom shot Fray."

By the time Pickens-Rountree made it to Kershaw Street, Jacquell Rountree had been rushed to a hospital. Dominic was on the run. He still is.

Their mother was left to sit in the waiting room at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center for hours, as news reports on her own sons flashed across a TV screen.

That's how Pickens-Rountree learned that Jacquell Rountree had died, almost two hours after he was declared dead and before the doctors came to tell her, she said.

She doesn't know what her sons were fighting about. She doesn't know why the fight escalated, or why Dominic allegedly pulled out a .22-caliber rifle and shot Jacquell in the back and a side. And she doesn't know where Dominic is now, she said.

"I need to talk to him," she said. "I need him to turn himself in."

On Wednesday, she was arranging Jacquell's funeral and jumping every time the phone rang.

She said she was terrified that Dominic would be killed in a confrontation with police. That she would soon be burying two sons instead of one. That the next time the phone rang, it would deliver more bad news.

"I'm not mad at [Dominic] - I love him. He's my son," she said. "I'm hurt that he could do this. I just want to talk to him. I need him to surrender."

Outside on the porch, as children played in the street, relatives gathered to talk about the shooting.

"He shot and killed his own brother. And he shot four times and killed his own brother," one said.

Inside on the couch, Pickens-Rountree buried her face in her hands. Jacquell was her firstborn, her "everything," her "baby," she said.

As a child, he seemed to have no fear. On a family trip to the Grand Canyon, he slipped under a barrier to pick up change that tourists had dropped, seemingly unaware of the precipitous drop.

"Everything was an adventure," Pickens-Rountree said. But he doted on his mother and took care of his siblings, she said, although he and Dominic seemed always at odds.

And there were troubles with the law, too, for her sons, who both are known to police by the name Roundtree.

In 2005, Jacquell Rountree attempted suicide in a city jail after trying to flee from a courtroom at a sentencing hearing.

Dominic was sentenced to probation in December 2014 after pleading guilty to a harassment charge. In 2005, he was 18 when arrested in Cherry Hill with a loaded handgun and 17 grams of crack cocaine.

When he came out of prison, he was "changed," Pickens-Rountree said.

"He was just different," she said. "He was hard. His heart was cold."

awhelan@philly.com

215-854-2961

@aubreyjwhelan