Tieray Jones, the man accused of killing his 2-year-old stepson and disposing of his body, told the jury during trial Monday that he refused a plea deal because he couldn't admit to a crime he didn't commit.
Jones told the jury that he could have pleaded guilty to the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter but didn't “because I didn’t do anything to hurt our son.”
Jones said the terms of the deal called for him to admit that he accidentally killed Jahi Turner, then panicked and disposed of his stepson’s body.
Prosecutor Bill Mitchell strongly denied that the District Attorney's office ever offered such a deal, and pointedly said Jones was misleading the jury.
Jones told prosecutor Bill Mitchell that he wants the jury to decide if he‘s telling the truth about what happened to Jahi, and if jurors find him guilty of 2nd-degree murder, he will accept the consequences.
Jahi's mother and Tieray Jones' ex-wife, Tameka Jones, testified as a rebuttal witness for the prosecution, after appearing earlier in trial, as a star witness in the prosecution's case-in-chief.
She followed Tieray's testimony and told the court that she believed his alibi for more than a decade but eventually came to terms with his alleged dishonesty.
"My life has been all about my son," Tameka told the jury. "I built my sanity and my life around my son coming home. Do you know how hard it is to know that that's not happening?"
Tameka choked up as she told the jury how she felt when she realized that her ex-husband had lied to her for more than a decade about what really happened to Jahi.
Local
She also described how her hope of one day finding Jahi crumbled, as evidence mounted against Tieray, who this week admitted during his own testimony that he had misled police and Tameka about important details of Jahi's alleged disappearance.
Prosecutors theorize that Tieray threw his stepson's body in a dumpster in the family's apartment building on Beech Street, and fabricated that his about Jahi's disappearance. Tieray testified for three days and finished his time on the witness stand Monday morning.
Also, in testimony Friday, Jones told the jury he’d been “shot over this,” and accused of everything from “eating Jahi to selling him.”
Jones said he was shot in the leg in Fredrick, Maryland, in 2010 or 2011, after he returned to Maryland from San Diego.
He said that in the years after Jahi disappeared, there was much discussion and many rumors about what happened to Jahi, in the Maryland neighborhood where Jones and Jahi’s mother lived, and where Jahi was born.
Jones said he had to leave Maryland for North Carolina “because there was a bounty for my death,” by people in his old neighborhood who thought he had killed Jahi.
He was eventually arrested for Jahi’s murder in North Carolina 2016 and returned to San Diego to stand trial.
