The crazed brawl involving 20 women outside a Staten Island NYCHA complex that ended with a woman stabbed to death defending her 12-year-old daughter started as a dispute on social media, police sources said Thursday.
What started as an online clash exploded into a bloody melee that ended with the stabbing death of Jennira Roundtree, a 43-year-old mother of four, outside her home in NYCHA’s West Brighton Houses Tuesday evening.
Relatives said Roundtree wasn’t even involved in the brawl and was only trying to pull her young daughter out of fray when someone in the crowd plunged a knife twice into the mom’s chest about 7:35 p.m., cops said. Roundtree was also slashed in the stomach with an umbrella.
“She only wanted to protect her baby,” Roundtree’s devastated cousin Nina Diggs told the Daily News. ”She only went outside to get her child in the house, only to find her child with a pack of more than a dozen girls on her. She tried to pull her child away and they all jumped her.”
Family and police sources said they were not sure about the nature or content of the social media screeds.
“I’m not sure how it started,” Diggs said. “But I do know it shouldn’t have ended in murder.”
Janice Diggs, the victim’s aunt, described Roundtree as an outgoing person.
“She loved her kids, loved them to death,” she said.
Neighbors and friends left cards and candles at a makeshift memorial outside the apartment building on Henderson Ave. near Broadway.
“This is a tradition in these projects that when someone passes away you give them respect by giving them a candle,” said one of Roundtree’s neighbors, a 70-year-old man. “I mean it’s only a dollar. It’s the thought that counts.”
The neighbor said Roundtree would be at summer barbecues.
“We used to talk,” he said. “She had just got a new job. I saw her the other day. I said ‘How’s the new job?’ she said, ‘Oh, you know, it’s coming. It’s coming.’”
He said Roundtree’s death traumatized the whole community.
“She was a pretty woman too,” he said. “I’m kind of hurt. What’s going to happen to the kids?”