A Florida man, feeling overwhelmed after the killing of his wife, decided to kill the rest of his family.
The trial has been in progress, and the jury will soon decide the fate of a man who killed his wife with a metal baseball bat and then, over the course of several weeks during the summer of 2019, murdered his four children and put their bodies in tote bags.
Michael Wayne Jones, 41, pleaded guilty to the murders of his four children and his wife, and the jury will now decide whether he will get the death penalty or life in prison.
The trial featured over two dozen witnesses, several days of testimony and multiple media presentations.
The defense attorneys tried to give the impression that the defendant was brought up in a dysfunctional home, hoping to avoid the death penalty for their client.
Prosecutors argued that Jones deserves the death penalty for his deliberate crimes against his family members who died gruesome deaths.
Jones admitted to the police that the killing began in July 2019, after his wife accused him of having an affair and followed him around the house harassing him until he snapped. He told police that his wife, Casei Jones, provoked him with a child’s metal baseball bat during the argument. The fight escalated and Jones grabbed the bat and beat her to death.
The four children were asleep in the house during the murder. Two were Jones’ biological children, two were his wife’s from another relationship.
Jones wrapped his wife’s body in blankets and put it in a tote bag, which he hid in the closet.
He then had to conceal the murder and attempted to make it look like his wife was still around by posting on her social media accounts using her cell phone.
The day after he killed his wife, Jones took his two stepchildren, 4-year-old Preston Bowers and 8-year-old Cameron Bowers, to a mall to meet their father and left them to stay with him temporarily.
He took his two biological children, 2-year-old Mercalli Jones and 11-month-old Aiyana Jones, to stay with his wife Casei’s mother.
Meanwhile he was trying to devise a plan to cover up the murder of his wife.
The children were returned to him about two weeks later.
Jones started to worry that the boys’ absence from school at the beginning of the school year would lead to questions from the staff at the Fruitland Park Elementary School.
Jones admitted to police detectives that one week before school was supposed to start, he took Cameron out of his bed and strangled the boy on the floor of his room until he died. He then put his body in a suitcase.
The following day, Jones choked Preston with a zip tie, and drowned him in a bathtub. He put his body in another suitcase.
A few days after killing the two boys, he decided to turn himself in to police, and he drove to a police station with his two daughters and parked outside. He changed his mind and decided instead to drown both girls in the bathtub. He put their tiny bodies into a single tote bag.
When investigators asked him why he killed his entire family, Jones said he was overwhelmed, and killing them all seemed like his only way out.
Police arrested Jones in September 2019, several months after the brutal slayings, after a deputy responded to an accident scene involving Jones’ car near the Georgia/Florida border.
The officer smelled something bad in the minivan, and upon inspection, Jones’ wife’s body was found in a bag. Jones then led the police to where he disposed of his kids’ bodies.
Jones also told detectives he had to kill the children because he had to maintain a facade that his wife was still alive and also because he was “mad at her.”
The death sentence must be a unanimous decision by the 12-person jury. The defense will rest its case on January 5.
