As a single mother, Crystal Roure was fiercely protective of her children.
So when she started dating a handsome guy from church, Crystal didn’t introduce him right away. In fact, she waited until they had been dating for a whole year before he met the children.
“She took her time,” Crystal’s sister, Stephanie Roure, told USA TODAY this week. “She had a happy glow that I hadn’t seen for a long time … My sister trusted him and fell in love with him. She finally found her happily ever after.”
But on Dec. 22, just two years after Crystal married Jason Kenney, he would end up killing her and shooting her 13-year-old daughter in the face at their Florida home — all over an argument over watching a football game three days before Christmas, according to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. Kenney later fatally shot himself.
The crime during the December holidays shocked the nation.
“The 13-year-old girl asked not to be shot – “Please don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot me, “” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said at a news conference the week of the attack. “And he shot her twice.”
Now as Crystal’s family goes through grief and shock, USA TODAY is telling her story and how she used her last moments alive to save her children.
Crystal Roure (bottom left) is pictured with Santa Claus, her three children, her mother Debbie Bailey (far left), her sister Stephanie Roure (far right), and sister-in-law Sandra Bartlett (second from left in back) on December 11, 2025, 11 days before Crystal Roure’s husband fatally shot her just before Christmas.
Who was Crystal Roure?
From a young age, Crystal Roure showed ambition and a commitment to hard work.
Her sister Stephanie recalled how Crystal did well in school and was successful when she got her first job at TGI Friday’s as a teenager, quickly graduating from hostess to server.
“What set her apart from others was that she didn’t just work for a paycheck… she worked for the experience,” said Stephanie. “She worked for knowledge. She worked to prove to herself that she was capable of doing things and not giving up.”
But when she became a mother at the age of 25, “everything she did from that moment on was for her children.”
“She worked harder and harder,” said Stephanie. “And somehow she was a superwoman. She managed to hold down a full-time job and be a full-time mother.”
Although Crystal had to juggle work and children all while on her own, she didn’t miss a school function, award ceremony or field trip. She also managed to buy a house on her own, “because she was an intelligent woman,” said Stephanie.
“Her children were her world. She worked hard for them, to provide for them. She protected them,” she said. “They come first before anything else.”
Crystal Roure is pictured.
When Crystal married Kenney, ‘she lost that glow’
At the beginning of the relationship, photos on Facebook show the pair smiling and kissing each other in many selfies. Others show them and the kids looking like a picture-perfect family, posing in front of a Christmas tree and at a baseball game.
But some time after they got married on 4 November 2023, Stephanie said: “My sister has lost that glow she had”.
At first, Stephanie attributed the change to the fact that Crystal became pregnant with her third child fairly soon after the wedding.
“I remember asking her, ‘Are you okay?'” Stephanie said. “She said, ‘Yes,’ it’s just that this pregnancy was really taking a toll on her butt because she was so much bigger.”
Although Stephanie said she always had an “ehh” feeling about Kenney, she thought her sister was happy and safe.
That is until she got the worst phone call of her life.
Crystal Roure is pictured.
What happened to Crystal Roure?
Crystal and her three children spent the evening of December 22 by the Christmas tree at their home in Highland City, just east of Tampa. Meanwhile Kenney was in his shed, drinking and watching Monday Night Football until about 11 pm, Sheriff Judd said.
When Kenney went inside the house and wanted to continue watching the game, a fight broke out. It got so scary that Crystal told her 12-year-old son to run to a neighbor’s house and call 911, Judd said.
As soon as the boy came out, he heard the first shot. Responding deputies found Crystal dead inside, her 13-year-old daughter shot in the face and shoulder, and Jason Kenney gone. They also found a letter that Crystal wrote to her husband saying: “You’re drinking, you’re using cocaine again. This is not the way a family should be. You need God.”
The one-year-old daughter that the couple shared was not born. The 13-year-old survived the gunshot wound after the bullet hit the bridge of her nose and deflected off the top of her head, Judd said.
After shooting his wife and daughter, Kenney drove his truck to his late father’s house and called his sister to say he had “done something very, very bad” and that it was the last time they would ever speak, Judd said.
Deputies followed Kenney to a shed on his father’s property. When they asked him to come out, they heard a single gunshot and found Kenney dead inside.
Judd said a relative told deputies Kenney had been beating Crystal “for a while,” though the sheriff’s office has no record of any calls or allegations of domestic violence. Jason Kenney had no criminal history, Judd said.
“He absolutely destroyed a family,” Judd said. “When you go in there, there’s a beautiful Christmas tree with lots of Christmas presents under the tree, just like the nuclear family should be… and it ends like that.”
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd holds a photo of Jason Kenney during a news conference on December 23, 2025.
How is Crystal’s family coping?
Crystal’s family is leaning on each other as they absorb the shock of her murder and raise funds for the children. Crystal’s 13-year-old daughter “is doing well in her recovery” and “it’s really a miracle that the bullet missed anything big,” Stephanie said.
Regarding any abuse that leads to the tragedy, Stephanie said that it is possible but she did not know of any.
“After they got married I know she said he was drinking a lot more but she said he was going to stop and she said he was going to get help with it. Of course that didn’t happen,” she said, adding that when she went to visit, Kenney was “sitting outside in the shed playing games on the phone and smoking his cigarettes.”
“If there was abuse happening it must have scared her to the point where she wouldn’t say or do anything because the type of person my sister was would have left her at the first sight of trouble because she was protecting her children,” she said. “But that’s a question we’ll never have answers to.”
Stephanie said she is angry that Kenney killed her sister and tried to kill her niece but that she is so proud of Crystal and her nephew’s actions that night.
“My sister died a hero for protecting her children and getting my nephew out of the house to make the 911 call,” she said. “She did them. She saved their lives and thus the nephew saved his sister’s life, and I thank God that the baby was not touched.”
Stephanie said she will do everything to teach her one-year-old niece everything about who her mother was.
“I will never let these children forget the love and strength and courage she had for them,” she said. “They will always know that she loved them and put them first.”
Crystal Roure is pictured with her three children.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Florida mother of three killed by husband over NFL game ‘died a hero’