Slain teen mourned in Norristown

Dominique Devlin, a 16-year-old fashionista who gave herself the runway nickname of Charvae Paris Monroe (after the city and the movie star), was mourned Sunday by her mother as a brutally honest teen who was quick to tell her parents when their wardrobe was all wrong.

She selected the outfit her mother was to wear to her middle school graduation (the pink suit). She wouldn't let her stepfather out of the house in the wrong shoes. (He might make her look bad.)

Devlin, of Norristown, was shot and killed early Wednesday near Green and Basin Streets in the borough. She was remembered Sunday not only by her family but also by neighbors and friends at a basketball game and fund-raiser for the family organized by the Greater Norristown Police Athletic League. About 450 people attended.

"We are so grateful that they are doing this for my sister," said Shante Dinkins, 29. "We're hoping that other teens will start paying attention to their parents and come in before curfew so we can keep families together."

Devlin's death was the second fatal shooting in as many weeks in Norristown. The week before, a 24-year-old man was killed near Haws Alley. This month, authorities arrested 10 gang members in connection with a series of crimes that began last year.

All of that has prompted Devlin's mother, Kimberly Spearman, to say: "It has to stop."

"We need to increase the peace and stop being afraid," Spearman, 45, said in an interview a few hours before the community event. "It's going to take the whole community - everybody."

Spearman, a homemaker, was sleeping when the phone rang early Wednesday and her niece told her about the shooting.

" 'Auntie, Auntie, my friend called me and said Dominique got shot on Green Street,' " Spearman recalled her niece saying.

Relatives said witnesses had told them that Devlin was talking that night with a youth she had dated.

"Seconds later," said Devlin's father, Keith, his daughter stumbled from behind a house. She had been shot. Then she collapsed.

"We know who shot our daughter," said Keith Devlin, 51, a carpenter. "But the process of the law just can't take him off the street."

Spearman worries that a "snitches in stitches" street philosophy may hamper the investigation.

In the meantime, the family is remembering a teen who crocheted gifts for relatives, once got a tattoo without telling her parents, and was scheduled to enter the 11th grade at the Devereux Day School in Doylestown.

Devlin sometimes participated in antiviolence events with her stepfather, Navarro Fischer Sr., 45, a corrections officer and a cofounder of the Midnight Run for Peace, a caravan of cars and motorcycles that drives through neighborhoods struck by violence.

Some members of the group attended the fund-raiser Sunday.

Spearman is preparing for funeral services scheduled for 11 a.m. next Monday at Macedonia Baptist Church in Norristown. She is also waiting for the day that police call her and say the shooter has been caught.

Said Spearman: "He is going to be served whatever God has waiting for him."