Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 7, 1995 TAG: 9511070044
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI AND JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Nike Jones loved stuffed animals. Several tattered white bears sit atop his bedroom bureau, where police found almost 6 ounces of marijuana in a drawer. A handful of basketball trophies are on display, won before he dropped out of school.
A door opens into the adjacent bedroom of his younger brother, Doobie, where police found $47,000 in cash under the bed, 132 grams of crack cocaine and digital scales. An immense stereo system, on which Doobie once liked to play loud reggae music, dominates one wall of the room. On his bureau, police found an assortment of ammunition tossed casually in a drink holder.
It's the illicit mixed with the ordinary - the stuff of teen-age life the brothers will never again enjoy.
Eric "Nike" Jones, 21, was buried last month, hit in the chest by a bullet probably meant for someone else.
Jerome "Doobie" Jones, 19, will be sentenced today for dealing crack, and likely will pass his 20s in a federal prison.
"Nothing went wrong until these drugs came around," says their mother, Deborah Jones. "I never thought if Doobie went down that Nike would go with him."
Life was comfortable for Doobie, Nike and their older sister, Lise, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Southwest Roanoke. Their father died of cancer when the siblings were young; their mother cleaned office buildings and rented a tidy gray home on Ferdinand Avenue.
Family and friends say the Patrick Henry High School dropouts had a choice. They chose the street.
"I think people look at [Doobie] as someone very bad," says his high-school counselor, JoAnn Hayden. "I don't think he's that bad. He just got in a bad situation, made some poor choices. And once into them, I don't think he knew how to pull himself away."
There are few mementos of the brothers in their home - no photographs of the two, none of the sketches they were so good at making.
The brothers would sit at the kitchen table, challenging each other to drawing contests. Nike liked to draw X-Men cartoon characters, 23-year-old Lise Jones says. "Doobie just liked to draw anything."
From this house, Doobie Jones also ran a crack business that police believe supplied most of the users in Southwest Roanoke. He got into the business at 14 because he was "out on the street," Doobie says simply.
His mother says she discovered his dealing a few years ago when a deputy showed up with a petition for him to appear in juvenile court on a charge of dealing crack. Doobie was sentenced to community service. When he was arrested again a short time later on a second charge of drug dealing, he was put on probation.
"I begged him, 'Tell me how you got into it. Is someone making you do it?''' Deborah Jones remembers. "Doobie said, 'No, Ma, it's all too easy.' He's seen his friends with all the flashy cars and the money, and it was just easy. He had a head on his shoulders to do what he did. But he did it in the wrong way. My dream was for those boys to grow up and get into some kind of business, something positive."
Deborah Jones rarely talks of the present. She prefers to reflect on her memories: Nike's talent for basketball, Doobie's keen sense for business. Both worked part time with their mother, cleaning downtown office buildings.
Their friends remember the midnight get-togethers at Hardee's that Nike started; the popularity that Doobie enjoyed with his classmates. But both dropped out of high school, and neither seemed to have goals for the future.
By the time Doobie was old enough to legally buy cigarettes, he had traveled to New York to set up his crack supply. Dealing crack provided the material things his mother couldn't and the prestige and respect he craved. Now, at an age when the biggest burden many teens face is deciding on a college major, Doobie is facing a 15-year sentence in federal prison.
"I saw it at first, and I kept telling him to stop doing what you're doing," says a friend, Lisa Germanio. "I told him, `When you turn 18, the cops are going to get you.' But he was just too high and mighty. He didn't want to stop."
A plain-spoken teen-ager with a quick sense of humor, Doobie was vague about his involvement in the crack business during an interview last week in Roanoke City Jail.
Dealing crack was just a money-making proposition to him. Using crack is stupid, he says. "I wouldn't do that. I don't smoke weed, let alone crack."
Even after leaving school, Doobie kept in touch with Hayden, his dropout prevention counselor.
"He would say, 'If I don't get back in school and do something constructive, I'm going to get into some serious trouble.' And we talked about it," Hayden says. "I've always told him, `You don't have to be there, you can be in school.' He needed reassurance that things can get better. But he had already turned 18 and was still in the ninth grade."
Looking out for his older brother, Doobie occasionally tossed some marijuana his way so Nike could make some extra money. Police believe Nike helped his brother deal crack, but Doobie insists he kept Nike out of that business.
"I would never bring my brother into something like that," Doobie says. "If anything happened to him, I'd blame myself."
But Doobie did get his brother in trouble when Roanoke vice officers searched their house in January, looking for crack. They found a .44-caliber revolver in Doobie's room and a gun in the living room, along with his supply of drugs. In Nike's room, they found marijuana and a semi-automatic pistol.
Police had known Doobie for several years and believed him to be a major crack supplier, setting up a network of dealers along Marshall and Day avenues Southwest. Doobie kept more than 20 guns in a Marshall Avenue "stash house,", which, he says, he never used. He drove a white BMW convertible, wore plenty of gold and bought only the best designer clothes, his friends say.
Residents of Wasena knew him as well. They say he and Nike brought the drug trade to their quiet, middle-class neighborhood - living off-and-on with a family, turning the home into a crack house.
"After the Jones brothers' arrests, the crack-selling market died in Wasena and dried up in the Marshall and Day avenues area," Vice Lt. Ron Carlisle says. "The street dealers were still there, but had little crack cocaine to sell. We sent police informants into the area to make crack buys from street dealers, and they were told there wasn't any available."
Police have exaggerated the scope of his business, Doobie says. As for the decline of Marshall and Day avenues, Doobie rolls his eyes:
"How can it be me when there's probably 20 other people on that street right now selling? [The police] just try to make you bigger than you are, try to get the judge to hang you."
They want "to get every little black person they can think of off the street," he adds.
Nevertheless, the cases were sent to federal court because of the size of Doobie's dealing. Harsher federal penalties meant each was facing a long sentence, with a mandatory minimum of five years because of the guns.
Doobie pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against his brother in an effort to reduce his sentence. His testimony was short and not very compelling. But he fulfilled his agreement with the prosecutor and will get a shortened sentence, although a judge will decide today how much shorter.
The two brothers shared a holding cell in the U.S. Marshal's Office during breaks in Nike's trial in July. Before Doobie took the stand against his brother, the pair sat together and cried.
Nike's jury was unable to reach a verdict, and rather than retry him, prosecutors struck a deal: He pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana; they dropped the gun charge. His bond was lowered so he could get out of jail until his October sentencing. He was likely looking at probation.
After spending five months in jail before his trial, Nike emerged intent on changing his life. Friends say he was enthusiastic about the job he landed at S&S Cafeteria; it was all he talked about.
But one week before his sentencing, Nike was murdered.
A little after 1 a.m. on Oct. 3, a man burst through the front door at a friend's house and shot Nike, who had approached the man, yelling, witnesses told police.
Michael Crump, 18, has been arrested and faces a preliminary hearing Thursday. The Jones family believes the killer was after someone else in the house and Nike just got in the way.
Doobie called his mother from jail, crying, when he heard the news.
"He asked, 'Mom, why didn't you look after him more closely?''' Deborah Jones remembers. "I said, 'Doobie, you can't tell a person where or where not to go.'''
Doobie, who now lives one floor below Crump in jail, says, "If I hadn't been out here doing this, I probably would have been there for my brother."
Doobie says he wants to work with kids when he gets out of prison and let them know the downside of the drug trade. He's also working on his GED and wants to take college courses in prison.
Whether his plans pan out or are just a temporary, jailhouse conversion, Hayden sees something positive happening already:
"He has goals now. A lot of people that get into selling drugs don't have goals. The money's good, and they just get sucked in."
Doobie says kids will listen to someone like him - more than they will teachers or cops - when he tells them the drawbacks of drug dealing. But, he acknowledges, he didn't listen when he was 14.
"Now, I see it ain't really worth it," he says. "It was never really worth it, I feel like. I had talked to my counselor. I was trying to get out of it. I was starting to wake up then. But it was just a little too late."
Now, he has a 16-month-old son whose childhood he won't be around to see.
"I hope ... I don't miss so much of his life," Doobie says. Otherwise, "he'll grow up with no role models."
Male role models are scarce in the Jones family: a father lost to cancer; Nike, to street violence; Doobie, to prison.
At Nike's funeral last month, friends spurned suits and ties and dressed in what they wore on the street. It was what he had said he wanted in a conversation with his sister and brother a few years before his death.
Even as teen-agers, the Jones siblings had talked about their deaths and how they wanted their funerals to be. To honor her little brother, Nike's sister fashioned black T-shirts with white letters proclaiming the date of his death. He was buried with an identical T-shirt that read, "RIP My brother."
In a conversation two days before he died, friends say, Nike wondered how he would be remembered:
"If the Lord came down and asked me how, where and when I die, all I would want to know is, when would I be a hero?''
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