NOV 15, 2020
Jahi Turner was 2 when he vanished in San Diego in 2002. His mother still searches for answers
For more than a decade, Tameka Jones held onto the idea — a fantasy, really — that her son would come home one day.
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“It wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I felt like I was not going to just implode, fall apart,” said Jones, during an interview at her home in Baltimore, a year after the jury did not reach verdicts in the high-profile case. “And even now it’s a teetering edge. Every day is more of a struggle.
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Jahi Turner, in an undated family photo
(Courtesy of Turner’s grandmother, Penny Thompson)
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“What do you mean you can’t find Jahi? Where is he at?”
Jones’ husband told her he had turned his back on Jahi just briefly, and the boy was gone. He said police were at their Beech Street apartment in the Golden Hill neighborhood of San Diego, and that they had begun a search.
Jones remembers screaming: “Where is my baby? WHERE IS MY BABY?!”
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Tieray Jones, then 23, told her and police that he had walked the toddler to a neighborhood park earlier that day. He told her Jahi asked for his sippy cup, so Jones walked to a vending machine to get the child something to drink. He remembered a woman in the park with children not too far away from them.
“He was like, ‘I just turned my back for a second.’”
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San Diego police officers sift through trash at the Miramar Landfill on Tuesday, April 30, 2002, in search of clues in the disappearance 2-year-old Jahi Turner. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Six days after the search began, the couple appeared at a news conference in San Diego, pleading for Jahi’s safe return. Meantime, officers were combing through tons of trash in a city landfill.
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In July 2015, the investigators flew Jones to San Diego to introduce her to Mitchell and the others working on the case, and to show her some of the evidence.
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Parga took Jones back to the apartment complex on Beech Street, where police had gone back recently to dig in the canyons behind it for clues. They took her to the police station where Mitchell told her unequivocally that investigators believed Jahi was dead and that her ex-husband was responsible.
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This was a turning point for Jones. She had been holding on to the belief that Jahi was alive somewhere. And now that belief was shattered.
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For the first time in 13 years, Jones read a journal she and Tieray had kept in those early months of their marriage. There were entries she had never seen, written after she had deployed on the Rushmore.
Some talked about Jahi wetting the bed and getting a bump on his head. One entry, dated April 23, 2002, read:
Today for some reason he hasn’t been moving or really talking. Jahi is starting to act really funny he won’t get up off the floor. He’s not walking or talking when I tell him to get his cup he just looks at me.
I know it’s going to take some time. But I don’t want him hating me for something I can’t control. The bump on his head has gone down I put ice on it. It’s gotten a little red
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Looking back on those journal entries, Jones said she now realizes they don’t sound authentic. They seemed “staged.”
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Working with prosecutors, Jones identified items found in a Dumpster near the Golden Hill apartment, confirming they had belonged to Jahi. And she told them Tieray had no money when she left for the Rushmore. She used all they had to stock the apartment with food.
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“(Jahi) had come out here from Maryland with his bag of animal cookies, and they were uneaten,” said Nicole Rooney, a child abuse prosecutor, who worked the case with Bill Mitchell. “And he loved those. So there was not enough food gone from the house. There was no evidence that he’d been living there that entire time.
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Tieray Jones, then 37, was arrested in North Carolina in April 2016.
He was charged with murder.
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In the end, 12 jurors deadlocked, unable to agree on whether he was guilty of second-degree murder.
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A few days later, San Diego Superior Court Judge Joan Weber ruled there would be no retrial, noting that a few drops of Jahi’s blood on a blanket and the writings in the journal weren’t particularly strong evidence of murder. The judge said it was unlikely that new evidence or new witnesses could be found that would persuade a jury to convict.
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For now, all there is to do is move forward, to keep working on herself and nurturing the positive relationships in her life. She recently launched a consulting business in human resources, and plans to start a foundation in Jahi’s name to provide resources to teen mothers — to let them know “that’s not the end of it.”
“You can still do what you set out to do even though you had a child at a young age,” she said.
Most of all, she tries to be a good mother to her now 17-year-old son. The one who never got to know Jahi.
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“I don’t care if it takes another 18 years,” she said. “but I am always going to continue to fight for the truth of my son.”
