Skip to content
News
Link copied to clipboard

Boy's screams led officer to bloodbath

In two years as a patrolman on the streets of North Philadelphia, Officer Edward Mintzer said, he never heard anything like the screams from the little boy who opened the door that night at 3213 Cecil B. Moore Ave.

In two years as a patrolman on the streets of North Philadelphia, Officer Edward Mintzer said, he never heard anything like the screams from the little boy who opened the door that night at 3213 Cecil B. Moore Ave.

"It was almost unintelligible screaming, animalistic screams," Mintzer told a Common Pleas Court jury Tuesday.

Then, Mintzer said, he made out the words: "They got my mom. They got my dad."

Inside the Strawberry Mansion rowhouse, just before 3:30 a.m. on March 5, 2012, the cause of the boy's screaming was clear.

Seated on the bottom of the stairs leading to the second floor, Mintzer said, was paratransit driver John Paul Jr., 35, head slumped against his chest, dead of a gunshot wound to the side that perforated almost all his internal organs before exiting.

At the landing at the top of the stairs was Paul's wife, Sherrell, 39, lying face down, moaning and bleeding profusely from 20 bullet entrance and exit wounds.

The boy at the door, 13-year-old John Paul III, and his brother, Jalil, 10, were not wounded in the gunfire, in which prosecutors say 12 rounds were fired from two semiautomatic pistols.

Mintzer was the prosecution's first witness in the trial of Ali Marsh, 38, one of two men prosecutors say created a "bloodbath" inside the Paul household in an attempt to steal an imagined cache of money the Pauls did not have.

The jurors also heard the young boy's 911 call, 10 minutes of him shrieking hysterically as he tried to follow the operator's instructions about applying pressure to the wounds of his bleeding father and mother.

"Dad! Wake up, Dad!" John III is heard crying, followed by, "Mom, where are you shot at?"

At one point, the boy holds the phone up to his mother, who is moaning, and says, "Mom, mom, mom." Then, the voice of a police officer: "You stay with me, OK? Stay awake for your kids."

The 911 tape was followed by testimony from Sherrell Paul and John III.

It was almost anticlimactic. Neither could identify Marsh or the other alleged gunman, and they had only fragmentary memories of being awakened in the night by armed strangers.

Sherrell Paul, a licensed practical nurse, said she remembered being shot and trying to crawl to her sons' bedroom to protect them. She said a gunman grabbed her by the neck, demanding, "Where's the money?"

When she said she didn't have any, Sherrell Paul said, the gunman dropped her and began shooting again.

"We don't have any large sums of money," she told the jury. "We were just everyday workaday people."

Marsh is charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, burglary, robbery, and gun charges.

Marsh's alleged accomplice, Charles Davis, 37, is not on trial. Davis' pretrial appeal about whether his wife's statement to detectives can be used against him is pending before Superior Court, forcing separate trials.

In her opening statement to the jury of seven women and five men, Assistant District Attorney Erin Boyle said she would prove Marsh was one of the shooters in the home invasion through the testimony of his former girlfriend and others - and a trail of blood Marsh left as he ran from the Pauls' house.

Boyle said Marsh was accidentally shot by himself or his accomplice.

Defense attorney Coley O. Reynolds told the jury the blood trail outside the Paul home was Marsh's but said prosecutors will not be able to present any evidence "that will put my client in the house."

"As for the blood outside, let's let the evidence play out before we decide what that means," he added.