Raymond Finney

In the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, Raymond Finney was known as a father and grandfather, a man his sister remembered as a "good brother." He lived with his sister, Florence "Tina" Pompey, a beloved neighborhood block captain who organized parties and gave out lunches to children in the summer. Their lives, however, were tragically intertwined with a series of devastating events that would shatter their family in the spring of 2017.

The horror began to unfold on the morning of Sunday, May 28, 2017. A family member, Tasmara McLaughlin, the mother of Raymond's children, went to the home they shared on the 1900 block of East Clearfield Street. She was desperately searching for her 25-year-old son, Raymond Finney Jr., who had been reported missing two days earlier after not returning from his job as a city sanitation worker. His backpack and phone had been found near the Schuylkill River. Instead of finding her son, McLaughlin made a gruesome discovery. Inside the house, she found 48-year-old Raymond Finney Sr., a Black/African American male, dead in an upstairs hallway from gunshots to his head and stomach. In a second-floor bedroom, she found his 54-year-old sister, Florence, who had been shot once in the head.

Philadelphia police detectives arrived at a scene that offered few immediate clues. There were no signs of forced entry, and with nothing taken from the home, robbery was ruled out as a motive. It appeared the killer had simply walked in, committed the execution-style murders, and left. The family’s anguish deepened on June 9, when a body was recovered from the Schuylkill River and identified as the missing Raymond Finney Jr. Authorities concluded that his death was a suicide, adding another layer of tragedy to the family's immense loss.

As the Philadelphia Police Department investigated the double homicide, suspicion began to focus on another of Raymond Sr.'s sons, Leonard Finney. Homicide Captain James Clark announced that Leonard was a person of interest. Investigators believed Leonard blamed his father for his brother's decision to take his own life, and that he killed his aunt, Florence Pompey, because she was a witness. Leonard was taken into custody on an unrelated parole violation shortly after the murders as detectives built their case against him.

The family's pain was laid bare in public statements. "They didn't have to do that to my brother and sister," said their brother, Reginald Finney. "She was the sweetest person in the world." In a March 2021 opinion piece, the victims' niece, Anntwinette Dupree-Hart, wrote about the lasting trauma, stating, "On May 27, 2017, at 5:06 a.m., she and my Uncle Raymond, her brother, were shot and killed by Raymond’s son." She described the immense grief and the struggle her family endured, including an uncle who was left with the traumatizing task of cleaning the crime scene.

In December 2019, more than two years after the killings, the case came to a legal conclusion. Leonard Finney pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree murder for the deaths of his father, Raymond Finney, and his aunt, Florence Pompey. By accepting the plea, he avoided a trial and was immediately sentenced to serve 40 to 80 years in state prison. The case, which began with a frantic search for a missing man and uncovered a brutal double murder, was officially closed, leaving a family forever fractured by violence and loss.