James Kirksey, a 36-year-old male from Chester, Pennsylvania, was killed on December 6, 1973, in a double shooting that unfolded suddenly and violently on the city’s streets. The shooting also took the life of Sudie Bell Green, age 39, who was struck down only a short distance away, turning what appears to have been one violent episode into two deaths within minutes and blocks of each other.
According to the available online newspaper account, Kirksey was shot at about 9 p.m.
in an apartment building at 3rd and Franklin Streets in Chester. Green was shot nearby, at about the same time, around 501 Bar at 501 East 7th Street. Reports described the two victims as being pronounced dead at the scene while about 15 people looked on, suggesting a chaotic public aftermath as police moved quickly through the neighborhood.
Police said they arrested a suspect within seven minutes of the shootings and several blocks from where the violence occurred. The man identified as the suspect was Howard Chambers, 27, of the 200 block of West 7th Street in Chester. He was arraigned at about 6:50 a.m. the next day before District Justice Nicholas Molla on two homicide charges and was ordered held without bail at the county prison.
The same report stated that Chambers had been on parole until earlier that year in connection with the 1968 wounding of a city cab company employee. That detail placed him in prior contact with the criminal justice system before the deaths of Kirksey and Green. The available online information does not provide a motive for the shootings, does not explain whether Kirksey and Green were targeted or caught in the same violent outburst, and does not show the final outcome of the homicide charges, such as whether Chambers was tried, convicted, acquitted, or otherwise had the case resolved.
