One thing that repeatedly came up while I was in Mississippi was the reputation of Officer Ron Jones, the man shot and killed during the raid on Cory Maye’s apartment. To a person, everyone I spoke with had nothing but platitudes for the guy. “A good guy,” seemed to come up a lot. I suppose all the praise for him could in part be due to the tendency we have to venerate the dead, particularly those recently deceased, who die young, and most certainly cops who die in the line of duty.

But even people who had some pretty nasty things to say about the Prentiss police department, and about the area narcotics task force, spoke glowingly of Jones. One black woman, who ran off a littany of race-based abuses she says black folks in Prentiss and Jefferson Davis County had suffered at the hands of white police, went out of her way to exclude Jones from those abuses. “He was a friend,” she said. The man with her added, “I got stopped one night. They said I had crack. I didn’t have anything. They hit me. Said they were taking me to jail. Mister Ron Jones showed up later. Asked me if I was okay, and told them not to take me in. He was a good guy. He was a good cop.”

“Maybe the only good one, in Prentiss,” the woman said.

Two people who knew Jones went so far as to tell me that had he not been the cop shot that night — had it been another officer — Jones would have been on Cory Maye’s side in all of this. That is, he would have recognized the predicament Cory was in, and that it was a predicament not of his making. That may or may not be the case. Having not known the man, it seems a bit of a stretch to me. It’d take one hell of a cop to defend someone who shot a fellow cop, no matter the circumstances. Just doesn’t happen that often. I’m also sure Officer Jones’ friends and family wouldn’t be happy to hear such sentiment attributed to him. But if you ask me, that people do say such things speaks quite a bit to the man’s character.

I write on this because I’ve gotten some email over the last few weeks from friends and family of Jones who’ve scorned for disparaging him, and for disparaging his memory. I don’t think I’ve done that. If he’d been a bad guy, or a bad cop, I wouldn’t much care about disparaging his memory. But by all indications, he was none of those things. And I’m fairly convinced that while there are lots and lots of problems with the Mississippi criminal justice system, and with law enforcement in the Pearl River Basin area in particular, few of those problems had anything to do with Officer Jones.

I have raised questions about the thoroughness of the investigation Officer Jones did leading up to the raid. I think that’s fair. Given the facts we now know, I don’t think any reasonable person could today look back and say that kicking Cory Maye’s door down that night was a good idea. It was Jones’ investigation led to Cory Maye’s door being kicked open. Which led Maye to fire in fear of his safety. So it’s appropriate to look at Jones’ investigation. It’s also perfectly appropriate to ask questions about why there either never was, or why there is no longer any record of that investigation. These things are important. If there was little reason to suspect Cory Maye of any serious crime, then there’s every reason to take Maye at his word when he says he thought the men attempting to break into his home were there to do him harm. Jones’ investigation plays into all of that.

That said, I’ve heard (and written) only good things about Jones’ character and integrity. His death was of course an awful, regrettable, and ultimately avoidable tragedy. But given what we now know, killing the man who shot Jones that night won’t honor Jones’ memory. It’ll only compound the tragedy. And I don’t think it taints Jones or his memory to do what we can to prevent that from happening.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 10:31 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Cory Maye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.