I saw this tweet earlier, but decided to wait to write about it, waiting for The Philadelphia Inquirer, for which I am paying to subscribe, to have more. Sadly, the Inky didn’t have all that much more:
Police are investigating the death of a Philadelphia firefighter as homicide
The 56-year-old man was found dead in the Holmesburg section early Wednesday morning.
by Nate File | Wednesday, October 15, 2025 | 10:43 AM EDT | Updated: 11:08 AM EDT
A Philadelphia firefighter was killed in the city’s Holmesburg section in the early hours of Wednesday morning, police said.
The 56-year-old man was found dead inside a home on the 4700 block of Shelmire Avenue at 4 a.m. after police were called.
A 27-year-old male suspect is in custody, and detectives are investigating the incident as a homicide. The suspect told police when they arrived that there had been a disturbance in the home, but the circumstances of the incident were unclear.
There’s one more paragraph in the story, but it tells us nothing.
But what interested me is something on which I’ve previously written. The homeowners of 4725 Shelmire Avenue were so afraid of thieves and street criminals that they literally put themselves in jail, adding bars to their front porch to keep them out. They aren’t the only ones on the block who’ve done that, as the row house at 4755 Shelmire has the same barred-in porch.
A look at the 4700 block of Shelmire Avenue via Google Maps Streetscapes shows not a run-down row home neighborhood, but a wide street, with homes at least visually decently kept. Many have been modified to close in their porches to create additional interior space. There’s no garbage strewn around — the images were taken just last July — and the Holmesberg section of Northeast Philadelphia is far from the worst section of the city, yet we can still see residents afraid of crime.
Zillow shows the interior details of 4725 Shelmire, so it was obviously on the market recently, and Zillow guesstimates the value of the three bedroom, two bath, 1,280 ft² home to be $211,800. An affordable home in a clean-looking neighborhood in Northeast Philly!
The newspaper reported, just two days ago, that an increasing percentage of Philadelphians are paying more than 35% of their income on rent, a percentage that the Department of Housing and Urban Development considers to be “cost-burdened.” Looks to me that they should be buying on Shelmire . . . if they are not too afraid of crime.