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BALTIMORE – Reginald Jones doesn't carry any pictures of his son, but he does carry his high school diploma.
"It's the only thing I got right now," he said.
On the morning of June 7, his son Kevin Jones was walking to his job as a guard at the famous Pimlico Race Course, which hosts the Preakness Stakes of horse racing's Triple Crown.
He was shot multiple times and died in the parking lot. Nobody has been arrested in his death.
Kevin Jones, 22, became homicide victim No. 123 in Baltimore this year. With the start of summer, many major cities are seeing spikes in violent crime, but no place is worse than Baltimore, which is suffering its highest homicide rate in decades.
Kevin Jones told his father he wanted to become an engineer and work with electronics.
"When he said that, I looked at him. I said, 'Man, that's for something,'" Reginald Jones said. "He said, 'Hell yeah.'"
After high school, he worked full time for two years and applied to community college. But graduating high school is the thing his father is most proud of, even though he didn't see it happen.
"I was incarcerated," Reginald Jones said about going prison for murder. "He started coming to see me when I first went to prison. Man, he couldn’t even walk."
With his father in prison for much of his childhood and his mother out of the picture, Kevin Jones found a way to beat the odds.
It’s been a terrible year for Baltimore. In April, the death of Freddie Gray after being in police custody sparked riots that injured scores of protesters and police. In May, 42 people were killed – the city's deadliest month in 44 years.
One of the people trying to tamp down tensions in the city is Peter Hayman. During April's rioting, America Tonight found him on the streets, toting a broom and cleaning up the city he loves.
“Let’s clean up our community instead of tearing it down," Hayman said in April. "Somebody has to do it. I’m young I’m out here, I’m trying to do it.”
But when we met up with Hayman this week after his best friend Kevin Jones was murdered, his tone sounded more helpless than optimistic.
"What can we do?" he said. "I said it takes the small things last time, the little things. But it's time to take the little things and make it bigger because right now, people was getting murdered senseless, like my friend … His father, that was his only son, and he's grieving right now. I can't imagine. I have two kids of my own. I can't imagine losing one of them. Not, let alone my only one.”
Baltimore has long struggled with violence.
In the 1990s, the yearly homicide rate peaked above 300. That's when Baltimore police started an aggressive approach, implementing a zero-tolerance policy. The homicide rate began to drop, but so did trust between the community and law enforcement because of mass arrests and a high rate of officer-involved killings compared to similar-sized cities.
After a bloody April and May, some Baltimoreans have blamed the city's soaring homicide rate on a turf war or gang-on-gang violence. But retired Baltimore policeman Leon Taylor has a different theory.
Taylor, who recently retired from the department after more than a decade, says Baltimore's homicide rate is skyrocketing because criminals don’t fear being arrested. He added that many officers have stopped risking their lives or careers to get illegal weapons off the streets in the wake of the riots and the arrests of six officers in Gray's death.
"I think the fact that you had aggressive policing, the fact that officers would aggressively conduct traffic stops, would aggressively approach people on street corners that appear not to have any business there – that might be planning a criminal activity or involved in drug sales or whatever – I think when you take that away in an effort to soothe the jangled nerves of the community, you take away an effective crime-fighting tool," he said.
Switching to a less-aggressive form of policing has led to a wide-open Pandora's box of evils in Baltimore, Taylor continued.
"You've got a hands-off approach and those people that were held in check by that, the possibility that I might get stopped when the car is stopped,” he said. “‘I'm not going to transport weapons, they might pull me over.' 'I'm not going to hang on the corner and plan something or sell these drugs because the police will approach me.'"
With this atmosphere in Baltimore, finding Kevin Jones’ killer may prove difficult. Finding meaning in his death may even be harder.
"He was different," said his friend Hayman. "He knew what was around him, but he wasn't trying to take part in that. And that made him stronger … It's so easy to get caught up [with] what you see right in front of you, even though you know it's bad. But when you know it's bad and you stand firm on what you believe in, and just be a living example, it's hard to see somebody get lost because of the chaos that's going around them.
"And if we had more people like Kevin that thought the same way, maybe there'd be less chaos, maybe there'd be less murders and stuff like that," he added.
If the violence could claim the life of his friend who worked so hard to defy the odds, Hayman worries it could get him next.
"I'm young, I'm trying to do it, but it's hard because I can be the next Kevin, or the next Freddie Gray or the next anybody," he said.
Reginald Jones still can't find any reason for his son's death.
"Naw, never going to make sense of that because they shot him multiple times," he said. "Hell, if he was out in the street going places every night doing this, doing that, maybe I can understand a little bit about who he is, or how he liked to hang out in the street.
“But he wasn't doing none of that, man. He just stayed in the house, man, watching the Animal Channel and shit. I mean, it just wasn't for him, man."
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