Mother of slain teen finds comfort in Compassionate Friends

The second her son’s heart rate monitor flat-lined at Pitt County Memorial Hospital, Tanya Jones became a zombie.

She lost her ability to feel or to trust and slipped into a robotic state, going through the motions as if her child had never left.

“These last six months, I have been dead inside,” said Jones, whose son, Rasheed, was fatally shot April 22 on the 500 block of Independence Street. “I went with him. I am here by face looking at him, but I am not here, because that was my life for 17 years and I have had to start all over again.”

Jones says she flirted with insanity, struggling to find a sense of purpose in a life centered on her only child since May 14, 1992 — the day she gave birth to him.

“I can’t function,” Jones said. “I thought, ‘I am going to lose mind.’ That was my love, my heart, my sunshine.”

She has woken up every morning to watch the school bus come to her house and wave a vaporous Rasheed off to school. She has walked around Kinston some days retracing her son’s last steps in disbelief. She has read numerous times an essay Rasheed wrote days before his death about how he aspired to help the black community and serving his country by being strong and independent like his mother.

“I don’t want to be crazy,” Jones said.

Jones found the hope she needed one Sunday when she mustered the courage to read The Free Press, which she temporarily stopped reading due to reading such phrases as, “gang-related homicide,” “shooting death” and “teen slaying.”

As she picked up the paper, a pink flier dropped into her lap advertising “The Compassionate Friends” — an international support organization for families that have experienced the death of a child of any age.

Making the call

Jones called Maria Lee, the head of The Compassionate Friends’ Lenoir County chapter. The two met at Neuseway Nature Park and talked for about 90 minutes about the mission of the group and what people should expect.

“We don’t have a degree,” Lee said of the organization that has groups worldwide. “We are all volunteers there to just give them a little dab of hope that they are not going crazy and everything they are feeling is grief, because they actually think they are going crazy, which is where I came from.”

Lee’s daughter, Bonita Tyndall, died 23 years ago next month in a “freak automobile accident” that left Lee to raise her grandchild, who was nearly 3 at the time. She said at that time she had no support group to turn to and that she just kind of “stumbled around” until Lynn West, a previous leader of the group, introduced her to the organization she eventually came to lead about 2000.

“This is not going to fix it. It just gives you a different way of doing things,” Lee said of her experience. “I can’t fix it for them, nobody in there can and that’s the part that rips my heart apart. I can look in their eyes and see where I was 22 years ago and it is a frightening sight.”

In Jones’ first meeting, on Sept. 13, she broke down with her sister and fiancé Nigel Croon sitting beside her, confessing to Lee and the group she “hated to go out because she was afraid she would get another call somebody else’s baby is dead,” Lee said.

Amid Jones’ breakthrough, her fear became a reality. At Richard Greene Apartments around 8:30 p.m. of her first meeting, a gunman shot 21-year-old Tyrone Collins outside his mother’s home, once in his hip and second time in the back — the fatal shot that struck an artery in his heart.

The Kinston Department of Public Safety has yet to make an arrest in the Collins homicide, but investigators have targeted Jerrell Pridgen as a possible suspect and want him for questioning. Pridgen, 17, is on the lam after the KDPS issued a warrant for an open count of murder on him for the shooting death of Rasheed Jones.

The department already has 17-year-old Kyliel Wade in the Lenoir County Jail charged with first-degree murder in connection to the crime.

Digging deep

Jones returned to The Compassionate Friends Oct. 11 to continue to get help, just like 10 fellow participants who have come back in recent months.

The group meets the second Monday of each month at 7:30 p.m. in Lenoir Memorial Hospital’s Neuse Room, accessed through the Wellness Center entrance. Each meeting opens with each participant telling a little bit about why they are there and what happened to their child.

If a meeting has new members — October’s had three — the majority of the time is given to them to talk as they are the “more broken ones,” Lee said.

Lee said while members’ sorrow largely stems from deaths in automobile collisions, those affected by murders and suicides are the tougher situations to approach, considering neither result from accidents.

“It is heart-wrenching and the most horrible thing in the world a parent can go through. I would not wish that on my worst enemy,” Lee said.

Other than serving as a roundtable of support, the group also discusses — with the use of a library of books and brochures — ways to overcome the deeper issues that surround the life-altering loss and holds events like balloon releases, candlelight vigils and cookouts to put ideas into practice.

“There is no instant cure,” said Lee, who calls each member between monthly meetings to stay in tune with their progress. “There is nothing I can say to make the hurt go away. The only thing I can do is be there for them and say I made it but it wasn’t overnight, in a week, month or year.”

The group talks about coping with the death on a daily basis, surviving the holidays, rationally talking about the death with others, mourning the loss healthily without resorting to abusive behavior, alcohol or drugs and overcoming the questions and thoughts that accompany the guilt complex, which Croon and Jones admitted is the most challenging obstacle.

Making amends

Not a day passes where Croon and Jones don’t blame themselves for Rasheed’s death and ask, “What if?”

“He was not my son, but he was like a son to me and we looked out for each other, and I feel guilty for not being there that day,” he said.

Croon wishes instead of taking a moment to prepare to go to work on the night shift at the William Barnet & Son’s textile mill, he had spent that time driving Rasheed to drop off an application for a job.

“As I was getting ready for work, I could hear him asking her where I am,” Croon said. “He was going to ask if I could take him to Rite Aid, but he didn’t because he wanted to give me a minute to myself before work and be with his mother. If I would have taken him to Rite Aid, he would have been back.”

The Free Press inaccurately reported in June Jones’ final steps, according to Tanya Jones. Jones and Croon said after dropping off his application for a summer job at the West Vernon Avenue Rite Aid around 4 p.m., he talked to his aunt, Angela Jones, and then went to visit a friend at her aunt’s Chestnut Street residence.

Tanya Jones said her sister last saw Rasheed walking behind the Social Security Administration’s office on North Queen Street. An employee of Big Blue store told the family the day following the murder he saw two suspicious men following him.

“I don’t know which way he turned after that,” said Jones, who rushed to the scene of the homicide when a classmate of Rasheed’s called her. “I try to count his steps and calculate the time, but I just don’t know.”

Tanya found her son lying on the ground near the friend’s house with a gunshot wound and the friend’s aunt screaming.

Gaining closure

Jones has worked to accept her son’s death. Like Croon, she feels she failed to protect her son, but in a different way.

She feels as if she is not protecting him now.

“As a mother, you protect your child,” Jones said. “I have always taken care of him, but I feel like I am not protecting him. I feel as guilty as (his assailants), like I pulled the trigger.”

Jones visited the Kinston Department of Public Safety and talked to detectives. Jones told The Free Press that investigators said they have received many tips on the whereabouts of Pridgen and are on his tail. Investigators have been mum on a motive in the Jones’ homicide, only to characterize it as gang-related. Court officials have said the homicide involved a trio of Crips targeting a Blood.

Tanya Jones said her son knew a lot of people, including some Bloods and Crips, but denied the portrayal of her son as a member of a Blood-affiliated gang.

“I do not know who played what role in all of this. Only God, Rasheed and those who did it know that,” Jones said. “I just want justice. Rasheed deserves better. He was a good kid, a great son and my special friend.”

Jones pleads that anyone with any information concerning her son’s homicide to call the Kinston Department of Public Safety at 252-939-3160 or the Lenoir County Crime Stoppers at 252-523-4444.

Lee encourages people to help Jones, as there is no word in the dictionary for a parent that has lost a child — that’s a lonely feeling.

“There is a word for a woman that loses her husband. There is a word for a man if he loses his wife. There are words for children that lose both parents. They are orphans,” Lee said. “There is no word for what these parents are because there is just no way to describe that deep a pain knowing your child is dead and you were supposed to protect them and keep them safe and you think you have messed up.”

Wesley Brown can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wbrown@freedomenc.com.

Breakout: Want to help?

- As a nonprofit organization, The Compassionate Friends Lenoir County chapter relies on donations to pay for materials needed to support families that have experienced the death of a child, including:

• Informational brochures
• Membership fees
• Mailing list supplies
• Newsletters

- Contributions can by donating money or supplies, i.e. stamps, in memory of a child or by participate in yearly fundraisers:

- The group will hold a candlelight remembrance service Dec. 13 at 7 p.m. at the Jackson Heights Free Will Baptist Church. For more information, call Maria Lee at 252-523-6408.