When he went off to college, however, Julius began to drift. “You don’t look at colour, but it was very diverse.” According to Madeline, a veteran schoolteacher, it was the kind of middle-class, multi-racial community where people know each other and got along, and all the parents seemed to work as a collective, fathers looking after each other’s kids on sports teams and families having each other over for picnics. He was one of the kids who “made it,” but the place he made it out of was pretty nice, too. At the time of the Paul Howell murder, he was at the University of Oklahoma on an academic scholarship. Julius was one of only two Black males to graduate in the top 10 percent of his class at Oklahoma City’s John Marshall High School. Julius Jones family described him as a gentle kid, always helping his sister and fellow children in the neighbourhood. His younger sister, Antoinette Jones, remembered fondly how Julius once took her to a fair where he promised to let her go hang out with her friends, only to notice him secretly trailing after her from a distance to make sure she was safe. “He liked helping people, I guess that’s one of his problems.” Julius was active in church, in sports, in helping kids around the neighbourhood with their homework. “Sometimes I think of him being a little Boy Scout or something,” Madeline Davis-Jones, Julius’s mother, told The Independent. (The Howell family did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) She said the shooter was a young Black man wearing a red bandana over his face, who had a few inches of hair peeking out from under a skull cap.Įven by the standards of the time, an era that birthed the ludicrous “ superpredator” stereotype of murderous Black teens, Julius Jones would seem an unlikely candidate as the face concealed underneath that mask. His sister, Megan Tobey, was the only eye witness.

Paul Howell, a 45-year-old insurance executive, was shot and killed in his parents’ driveway on 28 July, 1999. His fate begs the question: after years of civil rights activism, how much has the criminal justice system, and America at large, really changed? Jones was sent to death during the height of the “Tough on Crime” era.

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