Jahi Marques Turner

Case background and investigation

Jahi Marques Turner was a two-year-old boy living in the Golden Hill neighborhood of San Diego, California. On April 25, 2002, his stepfather, Tieray Jones, reported him missing. Jones told police that he had walked with Jahi from their apartment on Beech Street to a small park near 28th and Beech Streets, on the southeast edge of Balboa Park, and that he lost sight of the boy while buying a drink at a nearby vending machine. Jones was caring for Jahi at the time because the child's mother, a Navy sailor, was deployed at sea.

An extensive search followed. Law-enforcement officers and civilian volunteers scoured the park and surrounding neighborhood, and investigators eventually searched thousands of tons of garbage at the Miramar Landfill, but Jahi's body was never found. From early on, detectives were skeptical of the stepfather's account. Witnesses who were at the park that afternoon told investigators they did not recall seeing Jahi there, and neighbors reported seeing Jones carrying large trash bags to a dumpster in the days around the disappearance.

The case went cold for years before a break in the investigation. In 2016, fourteen years after Jahi vanished, Tieray Jones was arrested in North Carolina and charged with second-degree murder and felony child abuse causing death. Prosecutors alleged that Jahi had died from an injury, possibly a head injury reflected in Jones's own journal entries describing the boy as lethargic and barely moving, and that Jones had disposed of the body and invented the story of a disappearance at the park. Jones pleaded not guilty, and his defense argued the child could still be alive.

The trial ended without resolution. In March 2018, after jurors reported themselves hopelessly deadlocked, Superior Court Judge Joan Weber declared a mistrial; the panel had split 2 to 10 in favor of acquittal on the second-degree murder count and 10 to 2 in favor of guilt on involuntary manslaughter. Days later, Judge Weber dismissed the murder charge outright, reasoning that the absence of Jahi's body and the fourteen-year delay in filing charges made a conviction at any future trial unlikely. Although the judge noted that Jones had lied repeatedly during the investigation and that ten jurors believed him criminally responsible, no one has ever been convicted in Jahi's death. His body has never been recovered, and the San Diego Police Department still lists his case among its cold cases, leaving a toddler's fate formally unresolved more than two decades later.