Convicted killer of Swissvale mom and young daughter refuses to leave jail cell for sentencing

Kareef Easington didn’t want to face justice, but there was no escaping it.

Convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in the shooting death last year of a Swissvale woman and her 7-year-old daughter, Easington refused to leave his jail cell Thursday to attend his sentencing — and face his victims’ family.

Removing him by force from his cell wasn’t “in anyone’s best interest,” Allegheny County Jail Deputy Warden Fred Young said.

So, without Easington in court, Megan Campbell’s mother, sister-in-law and friend memorialized the Swissvale woman and her daughter Lyla while Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Kevin G. Sasinoski listened.

“I cry every day and every night,” Megan’s mother, Joan Campbell, 75, told the judge. “But there’s no hate in my heart.”

After the family was done speaking, Sasinoski left his fifth-floor courtroom for the Downtown jail, where he formally imposed sentence on Easington: mandatory life in prison without parole.

A jury in April found Easington, 36, guilty of fatally shooting Megan, 39, and Lyla in the head at close range on Feb. 15, 2023.

That morning, Megan tried kicking Easington out of the Swissvale apartment where he boarded on and off with her for several months, prosecutors said.

Joan Campbell’s voice was calm, even measured, when she asked Sasinoski to consider her granddaughter’s playfulness before he sentenced Easington.

“She loved to play with bugs, she loved to play in the mud,” Campbell, dressed head to toe in black and white, said. “I’m scared of anything that crawls. She loved it. And she had so much life left to live.”

Lakisha Campbell, Megan’s sister-in-law, cried while she addressed the court.

As she read a line about watching her husband — Megan’s brother —grieve, she stopped reading the printed statement in her hands, turned away from the microphone and wept.

“The loss of Megan and Lyla has shattered the entire family,” she said. “Every day is a constant reminder of what’s been taken away.”

Investigators believe that Easington killed Megan and Lyla around 7 a.m. on that February morning in their Sailor Place apartment.

Joan Campbell spoke with her daughter on the phone that morning at 6:22 a.m. Her daughter, who was usually upbeat and positive, was somber.

The last words she heard her daughter say — words directed at Easington, prosecutors said — were: “‘Get the [expletive] hell out of my house.’”

Easington called 911 that morning three times between 9:06 a.m. and 9:34 a.m., prosecutors said. The person never identified himself, but asked to talk to someone, or to have paramedics respond.

He then barricaded the apartment’s front door — placing a 50-pound and 30-pound weight on a chair against it — before leaping off the balcony to the mulch below and fleeing the crime scene.

Video surveillance showed Easington running from the apartment.

Five days later, when police interviewed Easington, he was wearing the same clothes captured on video — a gray, hooded sweatshirt and blue jeans. The sweatshirt, prosecutors said, tested positive for gunshot residue.

Tyleda Worou had been friends with Megan for three decades. They met in church at age 6. Worou was pregnant with her youngest son at the same time Megan was pregnant with Lyla. The kids were “inseparable” as they grew up together.

Her son remains confused about his lifelong friend’s absence.

“He asked, ‘Mom, how old is Lyla now?’ — I just broke down,” Worou said. “He knows his friend is gone but he doesn’t have that understanding.”

Worou asked the judge to hand down “the highest punishment” for “someone so cold and heartless.”

Joan Campbell didn’t mention prison sentences. At the end of her statement, she repeatedly insisted that she must remain strong in aftermath of her daughter’s and granddaughter’s tragic deaths.

“It seems like my life is over but it’s not,” she said. “I’m still here … in spite of what the enemy does, I’m still here.”