Clyde Fitzgerald Jones
La Plata, MD – The first-degree assault trial of Clyde Fitzgerald Jones, 27 of Waldorf, which has played out this week in the courtroom of Charles County Circuit Court Judge H. James West, could just about be described as a big old mess.
A little over a year ago, Jones, distraught over his sister’s death at Oak Manor in Waldorf, set out seeking revenge against the person he held responsible and allegedly told his former girlfriend that he was going to “shoot up this house.”
Charles County Assistant State’s Attorney Jeremy Widder told 16 jurors that’s just what Jones did April 8, 2015, only his bullets instead hit the home of Tanesha Hill, a single mother with her young son.
Jones is facing 16 counts including first- and second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and illegally possessing a firearm.
“I was in bed, watching cartoons with my son,” Hill testified Wednesday, July 20. “I didn’t know anything was going on until the officer knocked at my door. I was oblivious,” she said.
Hill testified that investigators found three bullets in her home, embedded in the floor, by a window and beside her couch.
She told Widder she had never been involved with anything like that before and moved out of the complex two months later.
“You did not see who shot at your home?” Defense Attorney Justin Eisele asked.
“No I did not,” Hill admitted.
Officers testified that witnesses to the shooting reported the defendant’s former girlfriend, who “didn’t want to see her son grow up without a father,” asked them not to testify and offered them money.
The woman’s own testimony contradicted what the officers said on the stand. When Widder pressed her about the allegations, she denied it happened.
In another segment, she burst out giggling when confessing that “Clyde and me had sex” in his car before the shooting began some time later.
Detective Jack Austin of the Charles County Sheriff’s Office said that the woman told him Jones dropped her off at her home following their encounter and kept staring into space when she tried to speak to him.
Austin said he had to coax information out of the woman who finally told him, ‘He told me he was about to go shoot up this house,’ the officer testified.
The detective testified that when they approached the defendant’s house he fled out of the back into a neighbor’s residence. The neighbor, it turns out, was a close personal friend of the officer, who was able to persuade his friend to get Jones to emerge, where he was arrested without incident.
Widder asked West to read a statement to the jury that because of a second-degree assault conviction in his past, Jones was not allowed to own or possess a handgun.
That neighbor eventually found the gun where Jones allegedly stashed it when he ran into the neighbor’s house two months after the shooting, and later found a stash of 38-caliber bullets the defendant had hidden in the bow of a boat in his yard.
Both were presented as evidence at the trial, which will not conclude until Monday, July 25.
Contact Joseph Norris at joe.norris@thebaynet.com
