Stephen Wilkins wanted his tenants out.
Crystal Hall, her younger siblings, and her mother had been renting Wilkins’ East Germantown home for about three years, when, in early 2023, they began to fall behind on rent. They paid Wilkins what they could of the $950-a-month cost, Hall said, but the shortfall was adding up.
Meanwhile, she said, the two-bedroom house was falling apart. The kitchen sink and bathroom tub wouldn’t drain. The railings on the stairs were broken. The living room ceiling was cracked and peeling, she said.
As spring turned to summer, she said, tension between the Halls and their landlord began to build. Wilkins said he was owed more than $2,000, but the Halls said they wouldn’t pay anything more until repairs were made.
And so, Hall said, Wilkins began to terrorize her family.
He shut off their electricity, ripped out their electric meter and circuit breakers, threw a brick through a window, and even went as far as to remove all of the doors and windows from the home, she said.
And then Wilkins sent a man to the house with a gun. And he killed her mother.
Police found Patricia Hall’s body, shot multiple times and collapsed behind her living room couch, on the morning of Sept. 16, 2023. And in an alleyway just around the corner, officers found the body of Felipe Askew — the gunman who prosecutors say Wilkins sent to the home to scare the Hall family into leaving.
Assistant District Attorney Cydney Pope said she believes that Patricia Hall, frightened by Wilkins’ escalating antics, was sleeping on the couch with her gun that night when she saw Askew, wearing a black mask and a hooded sweatshirt, creep through the back door of the home around 4 a.m.
“I think it was to scare her,” Pope said. “You’re going to break into the house, intimidate her, and make her think it’s not worth it, and get her to move out.”
Instead, Patricia Hall and Askew shot and killed each other. And Wilkins’ scheme fell apart.
A harassment campaign
Crystal Hall, now 28, moved into 127 E. Pastorius St. in April 2020 about a month after giving birth to her daughter. The following year, her mother and three younger siblings, then 7, 10, and 13, moved in after a house fire left them without a place to live.
Her relationship with her mother was not always easy, Hall said. When she was growing up, her father was in prison, and her mother, who gave birth to her at 17, did not always provide a stable environment, she said.
“She struggled with motherhood,” she said. “But she’s my mom. You don’t get another one.”
In time, her mother built a sturdier life for herself, she said, raising her other children and working as a home health aide. More than anything, Hall said, she loved being a grandmother.
But in early 2023, after Hall, who worked as a TSA agent, injured her back and was out of work, the family struggled to pay their rent.
Wilkins, 55, was initially flexible with delays or partial payments of rent, she said.
But the rowhouse had fallen into disrepair, she said. The living conditions had started to become unsafe, she said, but Wilkins didn’t seem to care.
They told him they wouldn’t pay any more rent until he fixed up the home, she said.
Amid the deteriorating conditions, Hall and her daughter left to stay with a friend. Her mother, with no other options, stayed on at the house.
Wilkins owned two other properties, including one in Strawberry Mansion where his close friend Askew had moved in after he was released from prison on parole in 2022, said Pope, the prosecutor.
Pope said Askew had roommate troubles, and in the spring of 2023, told Wilkins that he needed a new place to live. In texts, the pair appeared to talk about trying to get the family out of the Pastorius Street home so he could move in, she said.
“I need that B— OUTTA THAT HOUSE,” Askew texted Wilkins in April 2023.
It was around that time, Hall said, that Wilkins began escalating his harassment campaign against the family. He started coming to the home unannounced, arguing and trying to kick them out even though he had not filed the required paperwork to evict them.
Patricia Hall, 45, said she had a right to live there, and refused to leave without a court order, her daughter said. Wilkins then started turning off their electricity, she said, and ripped out the circuit breakers, leaving exposed wires hanging in the basement. He threw a brick through a front window, and disconnected the electric meter several times, she said.
On Aug. 4, 2023, Wilkins filed an emergency petition in Common Pleas Court, asking for help in removing Hall and her family from his property.
He wrote that he’d tried to remove the family without success and that during one attempt, someone shot at him. Wilkins said he filed a police report, but police said the report only referenced damage done to the walls of the home. There is no mention of a shooting, and no one was arrested, police said.
Crystal Hall said there was no shooting.
Wilkins said he feared that he or someone in his family might be killed without the court’s intervention.
“The police keep saying there is nothing they can do until someone is physically hurt,” he wrote, “by that time I might be dead.”
The request was denied after a judge said Wilkins hadn’t followed proper procedures when seeking to remove the family, court records show.
Wilkins was running out of options, Pope said, and turned to Askew, his longtime friend, for help.
‘This is wrong’
Askew and Wilkins’ relationship, meanwhile, was fraying. Askew owed Wilkins hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in rent, Pope said.
Texts between the two grew less frequent that summer, and Pope believes they started talking almost exclusively on the phone and in person to prevent a paper trail of what they did next.
On the night of Sept. 14, cell phone location data shows Askew in the area of the Pastorius Street home around 11:45 p.m. Pope believes he went there to try to intimidate the family into leaving but couldn’t get inside the house.
So the next day, around 2:30 p.m., Wilkins showed up with contractors and told Patricia Hall that he wanted to replace all the home’s doors and windows.
Hall refused to let him in, and Wilkins called the police. The mother showed the responding sergeant court records proving that Wilkins could not evict her and said they couldn’t trust him, according to the officer’s body-worn camera footage, later shown in court. The officer eventually persuaded Patricia Hall to let Wilkins do the work, Pope said.
A few hours later, every window and door in the home had been removed — but not replaced. Wilkins and his contractors left, with Patricia Hall and all of the family’s belongings completely exposed.
Patricia Hall called the police, and the officers who responded were mystified.
“This is crazy,” one officer said, according to his bodycam. “This is wrong.”
The officers repeatedly called Wilkins, but he didn’t respond, the footage shows. They told Patricia Hall that they couldn’t force Wilkins to come to the home, Pope said, and that without his cooperation, there was nothing more they could do.
She was left in the shell-like structure.
Patricia Hall had sent her children to stay with relatives, but despite her relatives’ pleas, she refused to leave the home, fearing that Wilkins would come in the night and throw her belongings into the street.
“She was scared to leave her things,” Crystal Hall said in a recent interview. “She’s just like, you know, ‘All the kids’ stuff is in here, and … I can’t afford to replace a lot of this stuff.’”
She tried to secure the house as best she could, and that night, she slept downstairs with her gun.
Wilkins pleads guilty
When Homicide Detective Joe Cremen responded to the scene, he was bewildered. He found Askew dead in an alley, and a trail of bloodied gloves and a mask down the street.
Surveillance video led him to the Pastorius Street home, he said in an interview, and then an officer recalled having visited the house the day earlier for a landlord-tenant dispute.
When they knocked on the makeshift door, he said, it fell in. Inside was Patricia Hall’s body.
Her family quickly pointed Cremen to Wilkins.
The case, he said, was a challenge to piece together. There was no video footage of the 4 a.m. shooting. There were no texts in which Wilkins explicitly told Askew to go to the home and hurt or kill Patricia Hall.
But between the months of harassment, the connections between Askew and Wilkins, and the removal of the windows, he said, he knew that Wilkins was involved.
“It was completely set up so his friend could come in and intimidate her, scare her,” he said. “And he brought a gun to do it.”
Pope said the case underscored the ways predatory landlords in low-income neighborhoods can “take advantage of people down on their luck.”
Wilkins pleaded guilty last week to involuntary manslaughter and solicitation to commit burglary. He is scheduled to be sentenced in December and faces up to 25 years in prison.
His attorneys, Fortunato Perri Jr. and Brian McMonagle, declined to comment.
Patricia Hall’s family, meanwhile, has struggled to move forward. Crystal Hall said her four younger siblings are scattered, living with various relatives who could take them in. Her 15-year-old sister is withdrawn. Her 9-year-old brother asks to visit his mother’s grave every week, she said, to freshen up her flowers and tell her that he misses her.
The only comfort, she said, is the justice that Cremen and Pope have brought her family.
Hall, who works with adults with disabilities, still has the keys to the Pastorius Street property. Wilkins’ effort to evict them was denied last spring after he failed to respond to a judge’s requests and hearings on the matter, records show.
On a recent day, Hall visited the damaged and deteriorating home that still holds some of her family’s belongings, but that she hasn’t had the heart to clean out.
In the basement, circuit breaker wires, ripped out by Wilkins, hang wildly. Her mother’s dishes are stacked in the kitchen sink. There’s a bullet hole in the wall above the living room couch.
Hall stood in the dining room, among bags of children’s clothes and toys, and fell quiet. Next to her was the collection of window panes her landlord had cruelly removed before changing her life forever.