Jadun Byrd was speaking with his mother on FaceTime when gunfire struck him in a St. Louis parking lot.

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — A 21-year-old man has been sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the 2022 shooting death of 19-year-old Jadun Byrd, whose mother was speaking with him on FaceTime when the gunfire began.

Jonathon Xavier Jones received the life sentence Aug. 7, more than four years after Byrd was killed in The Ville neighborhood. Circuit Judge Craig K. Higgins imposed the sentence after Jones reached a plea agreement with prosecutors. Law&Crime, citing court records, reported that Jones will have the possibility of parole. Jones pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and prosecutors dropped additional weapon-related counts as part of the agreement. The sentence closes the criminal case that grew from a lengthy investigation involving surveillance video, vehicle evidence, firearms testing, phone activity and accounts from people who were inside the vehicle used in the attack.

Byrd had taken a Lyft on March 2, 2022, to meet his mother at her workplace, according to the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office. He remained connected with her through FaceTime as he traveled. Prosecutors said that as Byrd walked through a parking lot in the 2400 block of Whittier Street, a white Dodge Journey approached him. A witness told investigators that windows on the driver’s side came down before multiple shots were fired. Byrd’s mother heard the gunfire through the call and saw her son fall. Police responding to the reported shooting found Byrd with multiple gunshot wounds. He was taken for medical treatment but died.

The FaceTime call became one of the most striking pieces of the case because it placed Byrd’s mother in contact with him as the attack unfolded, even though she was not physically at the scene. Leslie Byrd later described hearing people around her son after the shooting and seeing only part of what was happening once he had fallen. Her earlier public account emphasized that nothing appeared to have been taken from him. Authorities have not publicly identified a robbery as a motive for the killing, and the materials released by prosecutors do not establish a motive. The sentencing announcement instead focused on Jones’ responsibility for the shooting and the evidence investigators assembled after Byrd’s death.

That evidence included a trail of surveillance footage that investigators said connected the Dodge Journey to both Byrd and Jones. According to prosecutors, cameras showed the vehicle circling the area where Byrd lived before it followed the Lyft carrying him. Other surveillance footage showed Jones entering the Journey about 30 minutes before the shooting and returning in it about 30 minutes afterward. Investigators also recovered Jones’ fingerprints from the driver’s side of the vehicle. Those findings helped police tie him to a vehicle witnesses said had approached Byrd immediately before the shots were fired.

The investigation then extended from the vehicle to firearms and digital evidence. Authorities executing a search warrant at a residence where Jones was located recovered multiple guns. Prosecutors said forensic testing later linked one of those firearms to Byrd’s killing. Investigators also reviewed Jones’ phone activity and determined that the device was placed in airplane mode shortly before the shooting and taken out of airplane mode afterward. Two people who were inside the Dodge Journey during the shooting identified Jones as the driver and told investigators that he was among those who fired at Byrd, according to the Circuit Attorney’s Office and reporting based on the case records.

Jones’ age at the time of the homicide added another legal step before the case could proceed in adult court. He was 17 when Byrd was killed, so the case began in the juvenile system. Jones was certified to stand trial as an adult on July 8, 2024. That decision allowed prosecutors to pursue the homicide case in circuit court despite his age when the crime occurred. By then, investigators had publicly laid out the combination of surveillance, fingerprint, ballistic and witness evidence they said connected him to the killing. The case ultimately ended through Jones’ guilty plea rather than a jury trial, replacing the risk and uncertainty of a trial with his admission to the second-degree murder charge.

Byrd’s killing was also connected chronologically to a separate homicide case involving Jones. At the time Byrd was shot, Jones had escaped from a juvenile detention facility where he had been held in connection with the September 2021 killing of 29-year-old Brandon Scott in downtown St. Louis. Prosecutors said Scott was shot during a traffic dispute while seated in a vehicle near Washington Avenue and North Second Street. Jones and another man, Mark Perry, were later tried in that case. A jury found both men guilty in July 2024 of second-degree murder and armed criminal action.

Jones was sentenced in the Scott case in September 2024. He received 15 years for second-degree murder and another seven years and six months for armed criminal action, with the terms ordered to run consecutively, according to the Circuit Attorney’s Office. At that point, the Byrd prosecution remained pending. The earlier conviction meant that by the time Jones appeared for sentencing in Byrd’s death in August 2026, the court was dealing with a defendant who was already serving a substantial prison term for another killing. The public materials reviewed for the Byrd case do not specify how the new life sentence will interact in every respect with Jones’ existing sentence.

The guilty plea also changed the legal description of the Byrd case from the accusations Jones initially faced. Earlier records and reports showed that the prosecution had included more serious or additional counts during the case’s development. The final disposition, however, was a conviction for second-degree murder. That distinction matters because the sentence imposed by Higgins followed the offense to which Jones actually pleaded guilty, not every charge that had appeared earlier in the prosecution. Law&Crime reported that armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon counts were dropped under the plea agreement. The available public reports do not provide a detailed explanation of the negotiations that produced that agreement.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore said after the sentencing that Byrd had his life ahead of him when he was killed and that his family would continue to carry the loss. Gore also said his office would continue prosecuting violent crimes and pursuing cases involving people who endanger the community. His statement came after a case that took more than four years to move from the shooting through investigation, adult certification, prosecution, a guilty plea and sentencing.

For Byrd’s family, the court’s action resolves the criminal charge against Jones but does not change the circumstances that made the March 2022 shooting unusually painful. Byrd was 19, traveling to see his mother and speaking directly with her when the attack occurred. Investigators later reconstructed the movements of the vehicle they said followed him, connected physical and forensic evidence to Jones and obtained accounts from occupants of that vehicle. Jones, now 21, has been convicted in two separate St. Louis killings and faces a life sentence in Byrd’s death in addition to the prison terms imposed in the Scott case.

Author note: Last updated September 21, 2026.