Promyss Marcelle always suspected that out of all of her children, her son Jacobi would be the famous one.

It could be through sports. It could be Jacobi’s creative mind. Or it could be from the highly social 4-year-old’s obsession with dinosaurs, whose scientific names he would often recite to his mother.

She doesn’t remember when the obsession came on but noted that she would buy Jacobi toy dinosaurs on weekends after he did well in school at Moravia Park Elementary School, where he was in prekindergarten.

“I want[ed] to show [him] when we do amazing, you get amazing things,” she said Monday, left with physical scars from a gunshot wound and the pain of only having the “amazing memories” of her son. But she wants his name to live on — in spirit and through legislation supporting victims of domestic violence.

Police say that on the morning of Christmas Eve, Marcelle’s on-and-off boyfriend, Mark Jones, shot her as well as Jacobi and Peyton, his 1-year-old sister. The 4-year-old died at a hospital; his mother and sister were wounded. Marcelle, 27, said she had been planning to go to court that day to file for a protective order that would require Jones to stay out of the residence.

Jacobi’s funeral is scheduled for Friday.

Jones, 30, sustained injuries from a self-inflicted gunshot wound but survived. He remains jailed on eight charges including first-degree murder.

A ‘bad feeling’

The night before the early morning shooting in Rosedale, Marcelle said she had a “bad feeling” about her boyfriend, who was living at the Ross Ridge apartment. She eventually went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and called 911.

Dispatchers are heard in archived radio communications telling Baltimore County Police that a female calling from the Breslin Court apartment unit was whispering and wouldn’t say what was happening.

“I’m not sure if she’s in danger,” the dispatcher is heard saying.

Police responded to the residence that night, though they did not ultimately remove Jones from the home — a county police spokesperson said that officers saw no injuries while responding to the “verbal disturbance” and that, although only Marcelle’s name is on the lease, both adults resided at the apartment. Officers gave them information on how to apply for peace and protective orders.

Jones drew a gun from a backpack hours later, after an argument at around 6 a.m. during which Jacobi “was asking his father to leave the apartment,” police wrote in charging documents. Jones then shot at his family members and himself, police wrote, before calling his mother on FaceTime, telling her that he “couldn’t take it anymore” as his face bled.

‘I just want to keep going’

Marcelle said that she could talk for hours about her son. About how he was in tears during a birthday trip to Washington to see the dinosaurs at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. About how he loved his sisters and wanted to “be their mom,” offering to help his mother cook. About how easily he made friends and how even strangers have told her about the impact Jacobi had on their kids or themselves. About how he was a hyper kid who could light up the darkest room. About how his favorite color was blue.

“I just want to keep it going,” she said.

She wants to advocate for victims of domestic violence and push lawmakers to adopt legislation preventing more tragedies like the one she’s living through. It would be called “Jacobi’s Law” and would likely focus on how police handle requests to remove an alleged abuser from a household.

“I’m gonna keep going until the law is changed,” Marcelle said.

It’s not entirely clear what transpired between police responding to the apartment the night before the shooting — Baltimore County Police denied a public records request from The Baltimore Sun for body camera footage from that night, saying that it was part of an ongoing investigation. Marcelle hasn’t been able to get the footage either, and her sister, Blessyn, called it “very telling” that the family’s request was denied.

Currently, police can either make an arrest in a domestic incident if there’s evidence that a crime has occurred or enforce peace and protective orders, which are authorized through the judiciary’s civil side and can include provisions that order a person accused of domestic abuse to stay out of a residence.

Marcelle said that police advised her that they couldn’t remove her husband from the residence because his name was on pieces of mail. So she planned to get a protective order from court the next day.

In many circumstances, without a protective order in place or evidence of a crime, “mostly what [police] really do is try to de-escalate and ask [the person accused of abuse] to leave,” said Laure Ruth, public policy director of the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence. Police in Maryland and other states also use the organization’s Lethality Assessment Program, a practice that uses a series of questions to prevent intimate partner homicides.

That program, based on the work of Johns Hopkins University researcher Jacquelyn Campbell, is implemented differently among police agencies but is generally used to screen the risk of serious violence between partners.

While acknowledging the relationship was volatile, Blessyn Marcelle said Jones hadn’t ever been physically violent toward the children.

“When it’s someone’s relationship, you don’t want to intervene,” she said, “but it never came” for her sister. “Because when it comes to children, you do [intervene], and it had never gotten to that, until it did.”

The Marcelles noted that they have had to face a rash of online comments speculating about what Promyss could have done.

“These people say, like, ‘Oh, why didn’t the family do this or this or that?’” Blessyn said.

“We genuinely never saw this coming. It was so shocking,” she said. “If you would have thought of the worst thing that could ever happen in a million years, your mind will never wander onto this.”

The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). The Family Crisis Center of Baltimore County’s hotline can be reached at 410-828-6390.

Have a news tip? Contact Dan Belson at dbelson@baltsun.com, on X as @DanBelson_ or on Signal as @danbels.62.