John McDonnell/The Washington Post - Redskins' hopeful Reggie Jones holds his family close, which include his eight month old son Dash, center, and wife Kaleigh.
Reggie Jones lost his parents with one strike of a match in the middle of the night. His stepfather left the house in the back of an ambulance. His mother left in the back seat of a police car.
Twelve years later, the memory of that one horrific night of violence during his childhood is propelling Jones through the Washington Redskins’ training camp, where he’s trying to crack a crowded secondary and earn a spot on the team’s 53-man roster.
”After seeing what I saw, I knew that life was short and if I want to make something happen, I have to go do it,” said the 25-year-old cornerback. “Because anything can happen.”
Jones’s chances of making the Redskins are slim, especially as a cornerback, though he played extensively in Friday night’s preseason opener against the Pittsburgh Steelers. His best shot may be on special teams, and even there, he is practicing with the second team.
But after turning his nightmare into an NFL dream, Jones believes he can overcome any obstacle.
“I never thought my mom would end up in prison for murdering my dad. I never thought that could happen,” Jones said. “Anything can happen at any moment in life, so I just knew I had to take advantage of every moment and go.”
‘I didn’t know what to do’
On a cool October morning in 1999, Jones, then 13, was asleep with his sisters in the basement of his home in Seattle, unaware of his parents’ argument in the upstairs master bedroom over an alleged affair, according to court documents.
Tonya and Donyea Jones had begun fighting Friday night and continued, off and on, into Sunday morning. At one point, they “confronted each other with handguns,” according to the court papers.
Reggie Jones, awakened by a loud bang, sprinted up a flight of stairs and into a cloud of smoke. He looked down to see his stepfather — the man who taught him how to catch a football in the backyard — in flames, screaming on the floor.
“Don’t just stand there!” Jones recalled his father’s plea. “Help!”
“I didn’t know what to do,” Jones said.
He went downstairs, grabbed his sisters and fled out the back door.
Police said Tonya Jones lit her sleeping husband on fire. Consumed by panic, Reggie Jones remembers only a “blurry” image of his mother standing by the kitchen door on the phone. She called 911 four times while her husband lay writhing in pain as the flames burned 90 percent of his body in 10 minutes.
“I seen my dad all charred from the flames. . . . I seen them handcuff my mom and they took her away,” Jones said. “I had my two sisters standing under my arms and they’re both looking at me like, ‘Bro, what are we going to do?’ ”
The easy answer would have been to evade his responsibilities as head of the family he inherited that day. But his mother had taught him better.
“You’re a Jones. You’re a Jones. Make it mean something,” Tonya Jones repeatedly told her son as he grew up.
The jury convicted her of second-degree murder based on her husband’s dying declaration that she had set him on fire, his burned street clothes and a burnt match found on a laundry bag on the bed in the master bedroom, among other evidence.
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