THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 7, 1995 TAG: 9503070265
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 152 lines
As William Jones Sr. watched the 11 o'clock television news on his 73rd birthday, his son screamed for help two blocks away.
The father never heard those screams. He didn't know that his son was fighting for his life against teenage attackers armed with a cinder block and a broken bottle.
He didn't know that the assailants had dropped the cinder block on his only child's head enough times to cause an indentation in the ground beneath, and that they had slit his son's throat with jagged glass.
He didn't know that a group of people stood and watched but did not help.
``I just say God wasn't intending for me to know anything about it,'' Jones said in an interview at his apartment, where his son had been staying. ``Then I just feel like his time had run out.''
William A. Jones Jr., 43, died about 7 a.m. the next day, Jan. 2, in Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. He was the city's first murder victim of the year. Police made a plaster cast at the crime scene to record how deeply Jones' head was pounded into the earth.
Days after the killing, police charged three teenagers - 15, 17 and 19 - with murder. But on Feb. 22, prosecutors said they lacked evidence to proceed with a murder charge against the 17-year-old. A witness had become scared - the case evaporated. Deputies unlocked the youth's handcuffs and released him during a juvenile court hearing.
That same day, Juvenile Court Judge J.H. Flippen Jr. ruled that 16-year-old Neil V. Bates Jr., 15 at the time of the slaying, should be tried as an adult. He and 19-year-old Nathaniel R. Lindsey, known as Maniac, were indicted last week. Bates' trial is set for May 23. Prosecutors hope to try Lindsey the same day.
Authorities have no motive in the case. It didn't appear to be robbery or drugs. The victim and his attackers did not seem to know one another.
Court papers and interviews with family and friends chronicle the following:
Bates and some friends were in the 1300 block of Johnstons Road the night of Jan. 1. He and Lindsey had gotten into a fight earlier that day. The reason for the dispute is unclear.
Later, Lindsey and another friend bought some M.D. 20/20 wine and went to a grassy area of the apartment complex.
Before the night was over, Bates, too, would show up there.
Jones's son left their apartment in the 1300 block of Johnstons Road about 10:30 p.m. after a birthday party for the elder Jones.
``I had asked him not to go out that night,'' Jones said. ``I just wanted him here with me, that's all. He said he had to go.''
His son told him he would return soon. Jones figured that his son was going to visit an uncle who lived on 28th Street.
Jones' son climbed on his green bicycle with the basket on the back and headed into the night. He didn't get far.
There was a confrontation. Some say Jones saw a youth urinating in the street and asked him to stop.
Those words may have been enough to land him on a dead-end street near a little grassy area the neighborhood children call their ``play park.'' That was where he was beaten, in the small fenced area where two concrete drainage pipes - one painted bright red, the other yellow - serve as playground equipment.
Jones thinks his son was somehow forced deeper into the apartment complex - the opposite direction from the route he would have taken to his uncle's house. He may have been dragged.
``It was just a senseless thing,'' said Martha Williams, 59, the son's stepmother. ``I can't hardly stand to go by that place.''
People in the neighborhood told the family they heard the son's cries that night: ``Oh Lord, somebody help me please.''
Some say as many as 13 youths watched from the darkness.
The son was 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed about 155 pounds. Jones thinks it would have taken more people than the three charged to subdue his son.
``No way in the world those three guys could have done that to him,'' Jones said. ``He would either have whupped 'em or gotten away from 'em.''
Jones went to sleep on New Year's Day. By 11 the next morning, he was worried. He called relatives, hospitals and the police.
It wasn't until later that night that a detective came to tell him that his son was dead. By then, the family had gathered around Jones, who requires a defibrillator to regulate his heart and walks with a cane or walker because of artificial hips. They didn't want him to face the death of his only child alone.
``The hardest part for me to deal with is missing him around here,'' Jones said as tears trickled down his face. ``I keep looking for him. His room was back there. I still look for him.''
Williams, who lives next door, says it's hard not to be judgmental after the brutal killing.
``I don't trust no teenagers now,'' she said. ``I look at them all as being crooks and hoodlums.''
She replays the night in her mind.
``I just think about him around the corner yelling for somebody to help him, and we didn't know nothing about it,'' she said. ``If I would have heard him, I might be in jail. I sure would have gone to his rescue.''
Bates told authorities that he saw his co-defendant Lindsey after the two had fought earlier. He thought Lindsey wanted to fight again. Lindsey then told him he had ``killed a man,'' and persuaded him to walk back to the park where Bates saw a bloody and unconscious man. That is when Bates said he left.
He also told authorities: ``OK, I was there, but I didn't hit him.'' At another point, he said: ``I was telling them to stop. I left.''
When asked who struck the first blow, Bates told police: ``Maniac did, then I struck the second, then'' the 17-year-old who was released, he said.
Lindsey denied using weapons but admitted punching and kicking Jones.
If neighbors saw what happened, they aren't telling police. They're scared. Some have been threatened. Mothers are afraid for their children. It's a neighborhood where a night rarely passes without the sound of gunfire.
Zalina Matthews, the son's former girlfriend, said he had worshipped for five hours at The Way of the Cross Church in Norfolk as the new year arrived, hours before he was killed.
``I think God made it possible for him to see all the people he loved before he died,'' she said.
Matthews, 32, is horrified by the senseless violence, by the way the son's face and body looked when his killers were done with him.
The son had been job-hunting shortly before he died. He was an unemployed car mechanic who liked to tinker with anything mechanical or electronic. He grew up in Norfolk and graduated from Booker T. Washington High School.
He spent three years in the Army, and served as a radio operator in Vietnam. He earned three medals, including a Bronze Star.
One of his alleged killers, Lindsey, has no violent criminal record. His sole conviction was for a misdemeanor. Records show he had been unemployed about five months.
Bates received probation in May 1993 for breaking and entering and a suspended commitment to the Department of Youth and Family Services in June 1993 for possession of stolen property.
In recent years, Bates received multiple disciplinary referrals in school, many of which resulted in suspensions. Among the reasons cited for the referrals were insubordination, threatening, lack of attendance, profanity, disruption, trespassing, fighting and theft.
Bates wants to be an electrician. He also has talked about a rap music career.
For now, Jones' family and friends wait for justice.
``Somebody knows what happened,'' said Matthews, the victim's former girlfriend. ``A lot of people saw it. That's where everybody stands, out there. I was angry to know somebody knows what happened to William Jones and won't come forward.
``What if it was somebody in their family who took that beating like he did?'' MEMO: Anyone with information about the crime should call the Norfolk
homicide bureau at 441-5505 or Norfolk Crime Line at 441-5100.
ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by PAUL AIKEN, Staff
William Jones Sr., 73, and Martha Williams, 59, were the father and
stepmother of William A. Jones Jr., 43.
Color photo
William A. Jones, Jr.
KEYWORDS: MURDER by CNB