Left to right, parents Susan and Jeff Jones and sister Amanda with Mike Jones.
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Everybody’s best guess is that Mike Jones went into the river on the Friday before Thanksgiving, because that was the last time anybody saw him.
He didn’t show up for dinner with his parents at the Bugaboo Creek in Watertown two days later, and that’s when they knew something was wrong, because Mike Jones missed many things in this short, sad life, but he never missed a free meal.
“I guess we’ll never know if he fell in by accident or jumped in, but if I had to guess, I’d say he jumped in,” Jeff Jones was saying of his son.
Jeff Jones was sitting in his house in Lincoln yesterday and his wife, Susan, was sitting opposite him and they were talking about how it didn’t seem that long ago that they went to El Salvador to adopt their son in 1977, and yet it felt like a million years.
Susan had traveled in South America, was overwhelmed by the poverty, and vowed that if she could ever save one child from becoming a street kid, she would. Jeff was a lawyer downtown. They could afford it.
They got him when he was 3 months old. The doctors, the ones in San Salvador and the ones in Boston, checked the boy they named Michael and said he was fine. The only thing they noticed was that his head was slightly asymmetrical, from having been left on his side, a bottle stuck in his mouth, those first three months.
The couple brought him home to Newton and his 3-year-old sister, Amanda, looked at the cradle swing with her new baby brother with olive skin and asked, “When he starts to talk, will he speak Spanish?”
They noticed something wrong in third grade. Acting out. Obsessive-compulsive. Violent fantasies.
“He flew into rages,” Susan said.
They did a big psychiatric workup, and for five years Susan Jones drove her son to Wellesley for 50 minutes of psychotherapy, five days a week. He went to a special school in Sudbury. The diagnoses changed from doctor to doctor, but they all agreed that Mike Jones was mentally ill, and nothing anyone did for him could disperse the demons.
Later he became abusive, threatening. His parents took out restraining orders. They had him arrested. They had him hospitalized. They got him into a residential program in the Berkshires. When he was 21, the Department of Mental Health took him on and supervised him in an apartment in Waltham.
He had jumped into the Charles River once before, two years ago. But the cops fished him out before anything worse happened. In November, after he disappeared, his father spent Thanksgiving Day walking the banks of the Charles. Call it a father’s intuition: He knew where his son was.
Last Wednesday, Susan Jones was sitting at her kitchen table at 7 in the morning and opened the Globe and saw a photo of firefighters lifting an unidentified body out of the Charles in Brighton and she knew right then. She just knew. Jeff Jones was in Williamstown on business, but soon he was on the phone with Mike Maher, the Waltham detective who was looking for Mike, and Jeff Jones said, “I think it’s my son.”
When the ice thaws a bit, the Charles gives up secrets, but after Maher and State Trooper Tim O’Connor got the dental records, it wasn’t a secret anymore.
There is no scandal here. No uncaring bureaucrats to point fingers at. Everybody did their job: the schools, the mental health workers, the cops, and especially Mike Jones’s parents. Mike Jones didn’t fall through the cracks. People cared. People loved him. But he died, too young, all the same.
Yesterday, as a cold rain that refused to turn to snow fell on his shiny black driveway, Jeff Jones looked up at a gray, unforgiving sky and said he knew why his son went into the river.
“Mike was terrified,” Jeff Jones said. “Mike was terrified of the world.”
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Full article and photo:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/02/23/he_couldnt_be_saved/
