The bed sheet that police found around Jiha’d’s neck was placed with him in the body bag. There’s no indication in the police report that the sheet was examined for evidence. Jiha’d’s friend Blake recalled in 2011 that Jiha’d had brought the sheet to his house when he showed up to sleep over.
“He thought he would spend the night,” Blake said, adding that Jiha’d had brought his own sheet to the house before, “whenever other kids were going to spend the night.” That night, Blake had two other friends staying over.
Jones recognized the sheet as one from her home. “It was a gray and white sheet pattern, like checkerboard style,” she said.
The sheet, she noted, had been cut. Jones says only “20 percent” of the original sheet was tucked in the body bag with her son. Jiha’d’s Detroit Tigers ball cap, his Bible, and a plastic bracelet were still in his backpack. “Where,” she wonders to this day, “was the other 80 percent of that sheet at?”
The rest of the sheet wasn’t the only item missing when Jones took inventory of her son’s belongings. “His school ID was missing,” she recalls, adding that her son’s wallet “with $20 cash” and a ring were also missing. “Most of that sheet was missing. He had an iPod with Tupac Shakur and stuff on it, that was missing.”
The police report did not account for the missing items.
By 2:15 p.m. on the 14th, sheriff’s deputies were knocking at the door of Jones’s apartment in the Irish Hills section of South Bend to tell her that her son was dead. Jones says she was “numb” with shock and didn’t hear the officers say that Jiha’d’s body was already cut down and on its way to Hanley & Sons Funeral Home.
“I asked to see my son,” Jones recalls. “They said I couldn’t see him until after 4:00.” Jiha’d’s body went straight to the funeral home without an autopsy.
"There was nothing to indicate anything other than what it was… It was a suicide," Hurley said during a phone interview in August 2011 as to why no autopsy was performed. Hurley did not respond to a phone message last week.
"We went out and looked at the scene," St. Joseph County Sheriff Mike Grzegorek said during a separate phone interview in August 2011. "There were no signs of any struggle or foul play. Everything we found indicated that this was a self-inflicted injury.” Grzegorek last week declined a request for additional comment.
Indiana’s autopsy guidelines say that “the family or next of kin always have the right to order an autopsy.” But Jones was never told she could request an autopsy for her son.
“I just lost it,” Jones says. “I said, ‘He’s my baby boy. He was my everything. He was going to be something in life.’
“I said, ‘OK, now what?’ Officer Morton went on to tell me that the coroner had said that he had ruled out foul play. And he wasn’t doing an autopsy because Jiha’d was found outside. And then I asked them where my child was… I wanted to go to the site, but they wouldn’t let me. They said he’s not over at the site no more, he was at Memorial Hospital. And I said, ‘Take me to Memorial Hospital.’ And then they changed it, and told me that he was not at Memorial Hospital, that he had already been transferred to Hanley’s Funeral Home.”
Jones did not know it at the time, but in South Bend, the African-American community historically has been served by Alford’s Mortuary and Clark O’Neal Funeral Home.
“It’s more kind of a tradition,” says South Bend Pastor Mario Sims, a longtime activist and critic of Buttigieg and the SBPD. “Basically, they are willing to work with the black families… [Families] may not have had sufficient insurance, or they’ve had family members who either went to Alford’s or Clark’s. There’s tradition based on those two reasons that they would go to a black funeral home.”
When Jones arrived at Hanley’s shortly after 4 p.m., her son’s body was still in the body bag.
“I touched my child,” she said. “He was very, very cold. He looked like he was asleep.”
An employee asked Jones, “Are you all right?” As soon as she replied, “No, I’ll never be all right,” Jones says, she was ushered into an office where Hanley presented her with a “Statement of Funeral Goods and Services Selected.” There on the spot, she says, Hanley drew up a bill for Jiha’d’s cremation and memorial service. She signed the funeral home bill mere minutes after viewing her son in a body bag, and less than three hours after Jiha’d’s body had been cut down.
The total bill was $6190.
According to the state Certificate of Death, Jiha’d’s body was cremated at Wyatt Crematory, two towns away.
“I was coerced in getting him cremated,” Jones says. “When [Hanley] gave me that price list, he told me… that the morgue was over 200 miles from here, in Kalamazoo. I felt pressure because I didn’t have no money, but he was talking and saying he didn’t want me to handle the body. He said it was going to cost $250. Michigan charged $250 to $300 for an autopsy, and I felt pressured because I didn’t have no money.
“I didn’t know anything about the funeral homes here. If I had known, I would’ve gone to Alford’s,” Jones says.
Jones says Jiha’d’s body was taken from Hanley’s that night and transported directly to the crematory in Wyatt. The death certificate indicating that Jiha’d was cremated was filed April 15, the day after he was found. Indiana state law requires that bodies be held 48 hours before cremation.
A woman who answered the phone last week at Akron Concrete Products, the company that owns the Wyatt Crematory, refused to provide Jiha’d’s date of cremation. “We don’t just give out information to anybody,” she said.
Asked for comment last week outside his South Bend funeral home, owner Jon Hanley said, “I don’t have time today.” He briefly recalled the case, saying, “I did the removal at the site… I remember, he reminded me of my grandson.” Hanley declined to discuss the case further and did not respond to a subsequent phone message.
Hanley has strong ties to local police. He is a retired SBPD officer with 32 years of service. When Hanley ran for St. Joseph County coroner in 2016, he was endorsed by the sheriff’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 155, the SBPD FOP Lodge 36, and police departments in the nearby towns of Walkerton and Osceola.
Facebook photos taken during the 2016 campaign show Hanley alongside then-Sheriff Grzegorek.
To this day, Jones has questions about how her son died and how local officials handled it. But she remains steadfast about one thing: Jiha’d Vasquez, the Penn High School teen who carried a Bible in his backpack and spent summer vacations traveling to missionary-run Christian camps, did not tie a noose around his own neck and hang himself.
“He expressed to me that he would never take his own life because he knew it was a sin against God,” Jones says. “He not only told me that, he told a few people that, even my family members.”
His friends remember Jiha’d as a “loving kid” with a “big goofy smile” who loved music, especially Tupac Shakur.
“Jiha’d always said anybody who committed suicide wasn’t going to heaven,” said Blake Carpenter, Vasquez’s friend, in August 2011. “He said he wanted to be up there with Tupac.”
Reached by phone recently, Carpenter declined to speak further for this story. “This is still too hard to talk about,” he said.
“He never showed signs of suicide to any of our friends,” said Ila Beckett earlier this month. A former high school classmate of Jiha’d, Beckett said that “I, being a survivor of suicide myself, never thought [Jiha’d] was suicidal, like, at all.”
After Jiha’d died, Jones struggled to have her voice heard, with help from Thomas Bush of the South Bend chapter of the NAACP. The two reached out to institutions from the Justice Department on down, and had several meetings with law enforcement officials, including Grzegorek and Hurley. Those meetings all ended up back at the deputy coroner’s initial conclusion of suicide.
“Hurley called me on two different occasions,” Jones says. “He told me that he knows a suicide when he sees a suicide. He went on to say that my son didn’t suffer, and that was about it.”
Jones and Bush spoke about Jiha’d’s death before the South Bend Common Council, the city’s legislative body, at two consecutive public meetings in the summer of 2012.
According to the minutes from Aug. 27, Buttigieg was also at that meeting. During the meeting, Jones explained why she believed Jiha’d was murdered. She said that her son had been in “an altercation with another student [and] was called a nigger.”
Bush said at the meeting, “According to Ms. Jones, she was coerced into having the body cremated.” The minutes also quote Bush relaying an exchange in which Sheriff Grzegorek said he and his officers “know a suicide when we see one.”
Today, Jones still remembers approaching Buttigieg after the meeting and asking him for help.
“I tried to talk to him, and Bush tried to talk to him,” Jones says. “[Buttigieg] did give me his business card and he told me to call him. But when I did, that secretary down there, she would never put my calls through. That was a few times… I just looked at it like, he don’t care about people in the city getting killed, or investigations. There’s more about whatever he can do to please himself.”
At the Sept. 10 meeting, the minutes show, Jones and Bush told their story again. At one meeting, Jones read from a letter written by her daughter, Charlene.
