Kevin Clervil, a 38-year-old man from East Orange, New Jersey, spent the last hours of his life in the quiet, predawn dark of June 2, 2025, on the 100 block of Summit Avenue in Phillipsburg. Shortly after 4:26 a.m., a desperate 911 call came in to the Warren County Communications Center from someone inside a home on that block, reporting that an individual was attempting to forcibly enter the residence. What began as a frightened call for help would end with flashing patrol lights, crime-scene tape, and a man dying in a hospital a few miles away.
Officers from the Phillipsburg Police Department arrived within minutes, guided by the caller’s report to the modest residence on Summit Avenue. Outside the home they found Clervil lying wounded, struck by multiple gunshots in the driveway or yard area just beyond the door he had allegedly been trying to reach. Emergency responders rushed him to St.
Luke’s Hospital Warren Campus, but despite efforts to save him, he was pronounced dead there a short time later. In the first official statements that day, the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office stressed that the people involved in the incident were already known to one another, and that there was no indication of a random attack on the neighborhood.
As daylight crept across Phillipsburg, detectives and crime-scene personnel worked around the Summit Avenue home, photographing the scene and collecting physical evidence while neighbors watched from porches and windows. Authorities described the shooting as having occurred in the midst of an attempted forced entry into the residence, saying that Clervil had been trying to force his way inside when he was shot. The small stretch of street where it happened, usually just another quiet residential block, became the center of an unfolding homicide investigation. Online, his name soon appeared on gun-violence memorial pages, where family and friends remembered him and noted that he had been lost to gun violence on that early June morning.
In the weeks and then months that followed, detectives from the Phillipsburg Police Department and the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office, assisted by the New Jersey State Police, worked to reconstruct the confrontation that ended in gunfire. The investigation stretched through the summer, as investigators reviewed evidence, followed leads, and sought to determine who had pulled the trigger and why. Prosecutors kept repeating that the case was active and ongoing, and they urged anyone with information to contact authorities, an indication that they were still piecing together the events that led from a reported attempted break-in to a fatal shooting on a suburban doorstep.
By late August 2025, those efforts had crystallized into formal charges. On August 28, prosecutors obtained a complaint-warrant naming a Newark resident, 34-year-old James R. Dawes, as the person they believed responsible for Clervil’s killing. On September 11, members of the U.S. Marshals Service NY/NJ Regional Fugitive Task Force tracked Dawes down in Newark and arrested him, ending a months-long search for a suspect in the Phillipsburg homicide. He was charged with first-degree homicide in connection with the June 2 shooting, along with multiple second-degree weapons offenses, including being a “certain person not to possess a weapon,” possession of a firearm for an unlawful purpose, and unlawful possession of a weapon. Reports described him as an Essex County convicted felon now facing the possibility of a life sentence if found guilty on the homicide charge.
Even with Dawes in custody, authorities have continued to characterize the case as an active investigation, indicating that they are still examining the circumstances surrounding the attempted forced entry and the use of deadly force outside the Summit Avenue home. Prosecutors emphasize that the charges are accusations and that Dawes is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court. As the legal process moves forward, the quiet house on Summit Avenue remains a physical reminder of a brief, violent encounter in the early hours of June 2, 2025, when a 911 call, a locked door, and a burst of gunfire turned an ordinary residential street into the site of a homicide that would echo through two New Jersey cities—East Orange and Phillipsburg—for months to come.
