Remember 25-Year-Old Prince Jones Who Was Fatally Shot by Maryland Police in 2000
In 2000 Prince Jones, 25, was fatally shot by Prince Georges County, Maryland police officer Carlton Jones in Fairfax County, Virginia. The incident took place on September 1, 2000, and is just one of the shootings that led up to the current movement of the Black Lives Matter Movement more than a decade later.
Prince Jones was born in Fairfax County, Virginia in 1975 to Prince C. Jones Sr and Dr. Mabel Jones. At the time of his murder, he was attending Howard University along with his friend now an author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Jones was also a personal trainer at a Washington D.C. gym and was planning to enlist in the U.S. Navy. Jones also had a daughter, Nina with his fiancée Candace Carson.
On September 1 Jones was driving his Jeep Cherokee when he encountered two undercover Prince George’s County, Maryland police officers who were driving separate unmarked cars. The pair followed Jones 16 miles from Hyattsville, Maryland to Fairfax County, Virginia. Jones was driving to visit his fiancée while the undercover police officers were searching for a jeep similar to Jones’s vehicle that was tied to a stolen police weapon.
One of the officers, Carlton B. Jones, followed Prince Jones to Spring Terrace, a residential street. Jones stopped his jeep to get out to identify himself. Officer Carlton Jones identified himself as a police officer and flashed his gun at Jones. According to the police report, Jones then got back into his jeep and rammed it into the officer’s Mitsubishi Montero. Officer Carlton then fired 16 times at Jones who was still in the jeep, hitting him six times. Jones was able to drive off a short distance before crashing a few feet from his fiancée’s home. Jones would later die at Inova Fairfax Hospital.
Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr. refused to file criminal charges against Carlton. Then six years later in January 2006, a Prince George’s County Circuit Court Civil Jury declared that Prince died at the hands of Prince Georges County police was wrongful. Prince Jones’s daughter, Nina, was later awarded $2.5 million in damages. In 2015, author Ta-Nehisi Coates released his book Between the World and Me where he described the life and death of his friend, Prince Jones.
Sources:
(2020, September 19) Prince Jones (1975-2000). Retrieved from https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/prince-jones-1975-2000/
“Prince Jones,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/03/a-little-more-on-prince-jones/6967/; “Prince Jones,” The Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-14-mn-20917-story.html; “Prince Jones,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/07/10/421469553/ta-nehisi-coates-looks-at-the-physical-toll-of-being-black-in-america; Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World and Me (New York: Random House, 2015).
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