A 21-year-old man was walking to a store to get laundry detergent Tuesday afternoon when he was caught in the crossfire of a shooting and killed in Southeast D.C., his family says.
Kamal Jones was on Savannah Street SE just before 5 p.m. when people shooting at each other from inside two cars shot him, police and family said.
Jones' father said his son was shot seven times.
“He said, 'I’m going to get my laundry detergent.' He needed clean clothes to go to work,” Myron Jones said. “He'd take that route every other day, every other day.”
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Kamal Jones' cousin, who did not want to be identified, saw him on his way to the store and was there as he took his last breath.
“I just seen him on the ground and I ran down there and just held him,” she said. “Trying to get him to breathe, you know, just holding him because I didn’t want him to feel like he was alone. I wanted him to know that I was there."
“It’s traumatizing, you know, because that’s my first, my first baby cousin," she said.
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Myron Jones said all he could think about was getting to his son at the hospital until a cousin delivered the news that he had died.
“He told me they transferred him to the ME and that’s when it’s real, like, my son ain’t coming back,” he said.
Kamal Jones graduated from high school in 2020 and was beginning his career in the food business, his father said. He worked at Union Kitchen, where he'd just been promoted to supervisor.
His father said he had a shining smile and knew his way around a kitchen.
“I got to know that God loaned him to me for 21 years and took him back. … I got to wake up and say that to myself,” Myron Jones said.
Jones' family said the unrelenting violence in D.C. is wreaking havoc on families and young people.
“Everybody losing their family members, I’m going to pray for them too because now I know what they’re going through. Now I know. I physically could feel what they are going through with losing their people," the victim's cousin said.
“This is not a video game, my son don’t have another life that he can come back and spawn back here and say, 'Dad, what happened?'" Myron Jones said.
Investigators are still looking for the shooters and looking into what led up to the shooting.
Police are offering a $25,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest and conviction of those responsible. Anyone with information can call 202-727-9099 or send an anonymous text to 50411.
D.C. has surpassed 200 homicides this year, marking the earliest point in the year the city has reached 200 homicides since 1997.
