‘Your son was hit’
Four years after tragedy, mother wracked by grief in unsolved killing
Daphne Nelson had just finished making coffee when she read the message fromher neighbor back in Houston: Someone had shot her son.
It was morning on Nov. 26, 2016, at Camp Taji, an American-controlled base 17 miles north of Baghdad, where sheworked as a manager for a supplies and logistics firm contracted by the military. Every day, she got in early. She made her coffee, she fed her fish, and she got ready for the morning meeting. When she read the Facebook message, she was alone.
“They just did a drive-by shooting on your house,” her neighbor wrote. Then, in the next message: “They just told me that your son was hit.”
Her oldest daughter called on Skype. “Momma,” she said, driving to the hospital, “they shot Chaz.”
Daphne watched from her desk in
Iraq as her extended family trickled into a hospital waiting room 7,335 miles away. They passed the phone around. They prayed. They paced. Daphne sat at her computer, waiting.
She started screaming only when a doctor came to tell the family she’d done everything she could.
ChaztonRoshunJonesdied on Nov. 26, 2016, at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He was 23. His daughter celebrated her first birthday three days later. He left two sisters ( Jasmine, older; Mykala, younger), his mother and a large extended family that used to gather at Daphne’s house in Sunnyside for Soul Food Sundays. His killing is still unsolved, one of hundreds during a period when the Houston Police Department’s rate of making arrests in murders dropped drastically.
Just over four years later, Daphne is working from Houston for the first time since her son died. She watches the protests overAmerica’s systemicundervaluing of Black life unfold and thinks: Maybe if Chaz had been a white man killed in his own driveway, his casewould be long solved. She thinks: She should have been home that night. She thinks: If she had been home, she might be dead, too. Almost worse is dealing with the fallout — regret, anger, sorrow, guilt— that’s ripped up her entire family.
1
On the day he was killed, Chaz’s older sister stopped by Daphne’s house to plan his daughter’s first birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.
It was Friday, after Jasmine, then 27, finished up a shift at work. She had moved out of Daphne’s house with her two sons. Chaz and Mykala, eight years younger than her brother, still lived in the home in Sunnyside,
a historically Black community founded in 1912, home to tight-knit extended families. The neighborhood on Houston’s south side has family-run businesses that have been owned for generations and an activist tradition stretching back decades in the face of city neglect. Residents have fought against dumps in their community, red-lining, lack of services and slumlords.
Daphne had gone abroad 10 years agotowork first inAfghanistan, then in Iraq. Jasmine got it. There wasn’t enough money in Daphne’s old Postal Service job. Chaz had been 13 when Daphne went abroad. He didn’t talk about it much, except once to one of Daphne’s sisters. He felt abandoned. His aunt scolded, “She can’t make money here. That’s why she’s going over there, to get you what y’all want. You already know your momma loves you, so get that out of your head.”
When Daphne went abroad, Jasmine became a second mother to Chaz and Mykala. Adults from the extended family dropped by and reported back to Daphne. Daphne called every day, asking to be taken on Skype tours of the house and, if she found it messy, ordering the kids to clean up by the next time she called. Daphne’s brother, Venezuelan Jones — known as V — stayed with the kids when they were younger.
That night in November 2016, Jasmine left Chaz with étouffée before going home to wrap her Christmas presents. It would be her first Christmas without her boyfriend, who had been shot to death months before. He had been like a father to her two sons, Sam and Tre. Without him, they leaned even more on Chaz, an uncle who played video games with his nephews (NBA 2K, always the latest version) and taught them to play basketball.
He promised Sam he’d attend everyone of his wrestling matches. Sometimes he’d call Jasmine asking if he could pick the boys up from school. School was five minutes from her house. She wouldn’t hear from them for hours.
Of her three kids, Daphne thought Chaz was the smartest. When the familywatched “Akeelah and the Bee,” Chaz, sitting on the floor of the living room, turned around and spelled every word before the actors. But he struggled in school. As an elementary school student, he’d been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; the medications he was prescribed turned him zombielike. He attended Worthing High School but did not graduate.
He hopped jobs, not quite finding anything he liked. He’d gotten evicted; he’d gotten arrested. Daphne had been in the process of finding him a job overseas at her company when he died. When his daughter was born, he had been afraid to hold her (she was so small, what if he dropped her?) until Jasmine taught him how. Then he barely puther down. Hewould sit in the middle of the living room, video game console in his hands, his infant cradled in the crook of his arm.
Jasmine’s phone buzzed. It was her mother. She put the wrapping paper to the side.
“You talk to Chaz?” Daphne asked. She’d tried calling Chaz andMykala; neither of them had answered.
Jasmine called her brother. “Momma wants you,” she said when he picked up. She hung up the phone and went back to wrapping .
Daphne tried calling her son again. It was morning in Iraq. She had just brewed her coffee andwas sitting down at her computer. He didn’t answer. Then her computer dinged. It was the Facebook message from her neighbor. There had been a shooting at her house.
2
This is what happened at the house that night, as best everyone can reconstruct: Mykalawas home. Chaz played video games. Two of his friends came over. Mykala fell asleep on the living room couch under the window. V tucked his daughter into bed and fell asleep not long after.
One friend went down to the corner store, promising he’d be back in a few. The other friend fiddled with his phone; he’d been swipingondating appPlenty of Fish and invited over some girls. Chaz meandered into the driveway totalk toa friendwho’d just pulled up. He called his friend outside with him.
Then: Shots, one after the other.
Chaz reached for his gun. The next shot hit him in the chest. He spun around and fell onto the driveway.
Next door, a neighbor pulled his wife to the ground and lay on top of her.
Mykala struggled awake. Sometimes her brother and his friends shot their guns off. She’d heard gunfire before. But she never heard this much, and she’d never heard them screaming before. She ran to V’s room and back toward the driveway. V took off his shirt and put it over Chaz. She sawher brother cough up blood.
She remembers him saying: “Take me to the hospital.”
It took three of them to pick him up and load his 5-foot-9 body, still breathing, into the car’s backseat. They didn’t call the ambulance. V thought it would have been too slow. While Chaz’s friend sped to the first hospital he could think of, V made calls to the people he knew. They prowled the neighborhood, but they didn’t see any cars. They didn’t know what they were looking for.
3
Jasmine nearly ran out of the house in her T-shirt and underwear. She’d just gotten the call — Chaz had been shot. She couldn’t breathe. Her phone kept ringing. Someone told her Chaz had been driven to the hospital in the back of a friend’s car. She sped over and called her mother from the car.
“Where’s Chazton Jones?” she demanded of the woman at the hospital’s front desk.
“They’re working on him,” she said. “He’s in the next room.”
Could she go check on him? The woman didn’t move. Jasmine banged on the counter. She paced. She yelled: “Chaz I’m here for you; you’re not by yourself!”
A police officer came up to her. “You can’t do this here,” he said.
Her cousins sat down to pray. Jasmine sat with them for a moment. Since she prayed, she thought, he’d better live. She’d called Daphne back on Skype.
A woman came out into the waiting area. She began to say, “We did everything we could,” but shewas cut off by screaming. The family wailed. Daphne
shrieked: My baby, my baby.
Jasmine fell on the floor. “You lying. You lying,” she yelled. “He’s my child, I want to see him!”
Hospital workers suggested that the family go to the chaplain. Jasmine wanted no part of it. They’d already prayed. It hadn’t worked.
She walked outside and paced. She bumped into her sons, then 10 and 8. Her boyfriend had brought them.
“Momma, why are we here? What’s wrong?” It was Tre, her younger son.
She said: “Your uncle got shot.”
“This is happening again? We got to go through this again?”
Her older son, Sam, stared at her. “Momma, is he all right?”
She didn’t know how to tell them. Then one of her aunts, nearbywith her back to the boys and talking into her cellphone, said, “He died.”
She doesn’t remembermuch, but she remembers Tre, howling that he couldn’t do it again.
4
When she landed in Houston, the first thing Daphne wanted to do was see her son’s body.
It had taken her two days to get home from Camp Taji. Her coworkers had fed her tea and sat with her while she cried. She had gone from the base to Baghdad, from Baghdad to Dubai, from Dubai to Houston. She cried across the Atlantic. One of her seatmates asked her what was wrong. She said: I’m fine.
Her family drove her straight from the airport to the funeral home, where Chaz was laid out on a gurney, covered in a white sheet. She bent over to hug his body. He had a white cloth cap over his head.
“I’m sorry,” she said, over and over. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened to you.”
Every day she had to do something, and she could do only one thing a day. She picked out his final outfit: a blue, white and red polo shirt and Jordans. She picked out his casket: blue, with an etching of his name. She picked flowers: white for purity and blue because her daughters told her Chaz liked the color. She wanted to know where his body was being kept. In the freezer, the director said, and she thought of him alone in a dark cold place and cried.
In the weeks after his burial, the friends and family drifted away, back into their own lives, giving Daphne time to sit with her thoughts. She took shots of liquor alone. She thought : She had gone away, she hadn’t been there for him, she’d left him alone and now he was alone all over again in the ground . She was a failure. (Part of her wondered: What would have happened if she’d been home? Her logical side knew: She’d have been sleeping in her bedroom behind the driveway. Bullets had blasted through the brick and torn a hole in her covers. She’d probably be dead.)
She took her gun and her car and drove through the streets at 5mph. She turned into a nearby apartment complex on Scott Street and pulled up next to a group of men who looked about Chaz’s age.
“Did you know my son?” she asked. “Did you know Chaz Jones?”
Yes, they did. Theywere sorry about what happened.
“Do y’all know who killed him?”
They didn’t. She rolled up her window and drove on.
Whenshe got home, her cousin was waiting. Jasmine had called her, frantic, when Daphne left the house. Daphne lay down in her cousin’s arms and cried.
5
To V, it felt like the officers he met were too busy warning him about how to behave to investigate his nephew’s killing.
They came back to the house in the morning, after Jasmine and Mykala had cleaned Chaz’s blood off the driveway. Family members had gathered to mourn. They were still finding bullets in the bushes, in the driveway, all theway in the backyard.
The way V remembers, officers came, took pictures and gathered statements. He remembered one of the officers saying: He knew V was going to try something, he’d heard V knew a lot of people, and if anything happened in the neighborhood he’d look for V first.
V kept the pfft he wanted to spit inside and gestured around at the family. “You see us out here, you see the kids, we out here for real, man. We need some help.”
But he did want to retaliate. If he caught who did it before the detectives, he thought, there would be some problems.
Sgt. Anthony Turner, a Houston native on the homicide squad with 12 years in the force, had caught the case. Maybe he told V not to retaliate — four years later, he doesn’t remember. It was a complicated case: It had happened at night, it was gang-related, and thatmeant nobody would really want to talk. People had been in and out of Daphne’s house all that day. There had been arguments. Within four days, Turner had interviewed 25 people.
Daphne met with the detectives when she got home and told them everything she knew. Since she got home, she’d learned more about her son from the people who trickled in. She knewChaz had smoked; she didn’t know he’d been in a gang. What did it matter? she wondered. Hewasn’t doing anything when he got killed.
She learned about a new friend, one V didn’t like and had tried to warn Chaz about. She learned that Chaz had gotten into a fight with a man who drew his gun on Chaz. ( Jasmine drew hers on the guy, and nothing came of it). A woman she didn’t know brought her son to the house to offer condolences; if he knew anything about Chaz’s death, he didn’t say. She learned about a man who might have been after Chaz’s newfriend and shot Chaz by accident. She heard a rumor that when the maybe accidental shooter learned what had happened, he cut his hair in mourning.
The detectives had told her not to touch any bullets she found and to call them instead. She kept calling. There was another bullet, another rumor. She didn’t like Turner. Turner didn’t take it personally.
Jasmine took over calling. She tried to manage her mother, who claimed she wanted to be told everything but balked if she didn’t like the information. She became close with Turner, who always took her calls. He tries to keep up with families. He’s had relatives murdered. He knows howit feels. A relative of another murder victim Turner kept up with had become a police officer herself; Turner pinned her badge on.
The case got moved from his desk to the gang squad. When Turner himself got moved to gang-related homicides in early 2020, he adopted it back. He called Jasmine to let her knowhe had it, and to let her know his caseload was high, and the pandemic had made his workload even harder.
It was taking a toll on the whole homicide division — an internal audit showed that detectives were solving 89 percent of homicides in 2011 but had
slipped to under 50 percent earlier this year.
But he promised her that he would try.
Daphne put up posters around the neighborhood: On telephone poles, in store windows. They offered a $10,000 reward for information. Nothing came. She upped the reward to $25,000. She wrote a letter to the district attorney’s office one year and four months after her son’s death: “Someone knows who killedmy son. I justwant his life to have meant something.” She put out pleas on Facebook.
No one came forward.
6
It took Jasmine’s sons a year to agree to stay over at Daphne’s house. When they finally spent the night, they needed the lights on and the TVblasting. Tre came first. Then Sam. They don’t talk about it much.
After his unclewas killed, Sam got quiet. He stopped dancing. Tre got angry. He drew pictures of guns and doodled “R.I.P.” during class until his teacher called Jasmine to ask what had happened.
Tre promised his mother that when he was 18, he’d get a gun and kill the peoplewho killed his uncle. “So you know who it is?” she’d asked. He shrugged. “You’ll go to jail,” she said. He didn’t care. And he would find out who did it.
She took him to a psychiatrist. She doesn’t sit in, but she reads the notes and talks to the doctor. Eventually, in a session, Tre brought up what happened to Chaz. He said that stupid people killed his uncle.
Why do you think they’re stupid? the psychiatrist asked.
Because, he said, his uncle wasn’t mean to people, so they’re stupid. They killed him so they’re stupid.
How did it make him feel? “Angry.”
If he could see the people that killed his uncle, what would he tell them?
Tre said, “They ruined my life.”
7
Daphne stayed away until the bombing.
She’d gone back to work at Camp Taji months after her son died. She worked 12- to 14-hour days and spent her nights crying. She looked in the mirror at her swollen eyes and thought: I look like E.T. She cried on smoke breaks. Her family took balloons to Chaz’s grave on what would have been his 24th birthday without her. Every time she came home, she went to his grave. When she talked about Chaz, his quick temper and quick laugh, she reached for a cigarette.
She thought about selling her house. She’d grownupthere and bought out her siblings. She’d had plans to remodel once she saved enough money. But that was before her daughters had to wash her son’s blood out of the driveway with bleach. One of her bosses over in Iraq, an elderly man they all called Papa, said, “Baby girl, don’t make rash decisions right now.”
She hung onto it. Three years went by. On March 12, 2020, the first bombs hit Camp Taji. As she ran to the shelter, a bomb threw her down on the ground. She came home to Houston — for good this time — with busted knees and post-traumatic stress disorder. During the hours in the bunker, she knew she was going to die. She didn’t know how Jasmine andMykala would survive.
Mykala had been 15 when she saw her brother bleed out. She threw up every day until the funeral. She didn’t clean herself for two days after he was killed, until V pulled her up and put her in the shower, clothes and all. She sat down in the tub and stared at the wall.
Jasmine hoped it would make her growup. Instead, Mykala got into fights. She and Chaz had been set to getmatching cars for Christmas. She got hers and crashed it. She got a tattoo of his face on her upper arm. It was her first tattoo. She meant it to go all theway down her arm, but it hurt too much. She’ll finish it soon.
Sometimes she wanted to kill herself, but she couldn’t do that to Daphne. She wanted to pull out a gun and go hunt her brother’s killers, but that would land her in jail and her mother would effectively lose another child. She graduated from high school (her brother never did). She flunked a semester of college.
Daphne got a therapist to deal with the PTSD from the bombing. Sometimes they just talk about Chaz; she never got counseling after he died. In May, her therapist told her to write a page about the most traumatic event in her life. She wrote about the bombings and Chaz’s murder — over three years apart, but somehow, for her, connected.
“I have no power at all. I couldn’t stop the bombs from coming in on the site, and I couldn’t stop the animals from murdering my son. I have no control of what others do it just seem so hopeless,” she concluded. “I am sad, hurt, afraid, scared, low self-esteem, distrust, uncertainty, indecision and angry. I ambroken emotional intimacy, intellectual, physical, experiential and spiritually.”
Jasmine watches Daphne drinking more, smoking cigarettes. She sees Mykala crashing cars. She posts pictures of her brother online. She gets irritable everyNovember. She prefers not to talk about it.
8
Daphne never visits her son without flowers and Windex.
He’s buried 2½ hours northwest of Houston in Freestone County, where her family has owned land for generations. Chaz is on the end of a row of Daphne’s family members. His gravestone, black with his face chiseled above the epitaph, was Daphne’s design, ordered from India. On the front, she had carved: “My Son Chazton.”
The first time visiting since the bombing, Daphne and her family wore blue T-shirts with pictures of Chaz. She brought fabric flowers, blue and white.
“My baby,” she murmured, handing off the fabric flowers to her sister so she could lay a hand on the headstone. “My baby.”
Her brother’s son finished a run through the graveyard and stopped by Daphne.
“Where did we bury Chaz?” he asked.
“Right here, Poppa.” Helookeddownat thereddirt around the grave, eyes wide, and leaped back.
“You been here before, several times…”
“But I didn’t know he would be under here.”
He took off for the far side of the cemetery, under the trees by the chain-link fence.
Mykala sprayed Windex on the gravestone, scrubbing the red dirt and dust off with paper towels. She rested her hand on the carving of Chaz’s face, rubbing it with her thumb.
Daphne andMykala took their traditional picture with the headstone. Daphne handed her phone to Mykala: She wanted a picture with her son, alone.
“Make a cute pose,” Mykala said.
“This is not — I’m not happy.” She stared at the camera, hand on the headstone.
“I know.”
The familymade theirway out of the graveyard. Daphne sat in the passenger’s seat while her brother and Mykala loaded up. She poured herself a shot from the vodka bottle she’d brought from home. On the way back, they would stop by a country store with a deli counter of smokedmeats and shelves full of baked goods and knickknacks. She would buy a serrated tin cross with “Thankful” written over it in curlicue script, a white sign with “Family” in black. She would hang them on the fence overlooking the driveway. She likes the reminders.