A heroic Florida mom died protecting her children after her husband flew into a rage over an NFL game and shot her daughter in the face, authorities said.
Jason Kenney, 47, gunned down his wife, Crystal Roure, 38, just days before Christmas, after she asked him to turn off the San Francisco 49ers versus Indianapolis Colts game, USA Today reported.
Kenney had “been drinking during the evening” on Dec. 22 as he watched his favorite team, the 49ers, beat the Colts. When Roure told him that “she did not want to watch football” anymore, Kenney became incensed, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
At around 11 p.m., “the argument got really heated,” and Roure told her son, 12, to go to a neighbor and call 911, Sheriff Grady Judd told reporters.
As the boy was leaving the Lakeland home, he heard a gunshot, Grady said.
Deputies were called to the house and found Roure’s lifeless body, along with her critically wounded daughter, 13, deputies said.
Kenney had shot the teen, his stepdaughter, in the face. Miraculously, she survived, with the bullet striking her nose and ricocheting through the top of her head, USA Today reported.
The couple’s baby girl, their only child together, was asleep unharmed in her crib, deputies said.
Kenney fled to his late father’s home nearby before calling his sister in Upstate New York, and telling her, “I’ve done something very, very bad, very bad,” Sheriff Judd said.
“You’ll see me on the news, but I am not going to jail. I’m not going to jail for the rest of my life,” he told his sister.
When deputies tracked Kenney down to his late father’s home, they heard a single gunshot come from the shed.
Roure, who had two older children from a previous relationship, had married Kenney two years earlier after meeting him at church.
He was reportedly violent and had struggles with drugs and alcohol, deputies said.
“You know you’re drinking, you’re using cocaine again. This is not the way the family should be. You need God,” Roure wrote in an undated note to her husband that was reportedly found at the couple’s house, and quoted by deputies.
