It seems in retrospect to his family that Steven Tyrone Jones must have been awake upstairs, perhaps anticipating the trouble to come, when police showed up before dawn Tuesday at his father?s front door.
“They?re for me,” Jones told his father, and so Michael Rock went downstairs to let them in ? just another arrest on his son?s rap sheet, he thought. But in the time it took police to reach the staircase, according to Rock?s account of the shooting that critically wounded a decorated Maryland State trooper and cost Jones his life, something turned his son fatalistic.
“He [must have] just looked at what his life had been like,” said Mike Rock, Jones? brother, sitting within feet of the blood-stained carpet where his brother died in a heap. Asked why Jones, who recently seemed so hopeful and inspired, would come out shooting, his brother said, “He was tired. He didn?t want to go” back to prison.
As the Rock family gathered in their Woodlawn home Wednesday and looked over the shooting debris, downtown at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center a recovering Trooper 1st Class Eric D. Workman was hailed by his teary-eyed father as a beloved and “very tough person.”
“He looks good, his color is good,” Gary “Buzz” Workman said, standing with family members outside the hospital. Eric Workman was still listed in critical but stable condition Wednesday after he was shot in the armpit trying to serve an arrest warrant on Jones, officials said.
But Gary Workman said doctors are”hopefully optimistic,” with his son sitting up and squeezing hands to communicate.
Police work runs in the family. Gary Workman has worked with the U.S. Secret Service, while Eric?s brother is in law enforcement in Virginia. “That?s what he always wanted to do,” Gary Workman said of Eric.
“He?s an inspiration,” said 1st Sgt. Russell Newell, a spokesman for the state police. Eric Workman was struck by a car and badly injured in 1998 ? an experience that would have sent some troopers into retirement, Newell said, but not the dedicated and famously detail-oriented Workman. “It?s something he loves to do.”
Michael Rock opened the door to his son?s bedroom, where bottles of cologne and a set of candles were lined up neatly along a shelf and piles of clothes were still strewn across the bed after the police search.
Rock pointed to the bullet hole in a wall where his son must have stood and fired at police after deciding this would be his final exit.
“I?ve lost my son. I can live with that. He lived the lifestyle; he went out,” Rock said. But he said he watched officers shoot Jones, who was wanted in connection with a Carroll County home invasion, multiple times after he was already dead.
Rock said he was also angry the whole incident unfolded in front of his 7-year-old daughter, clad in her pink pajamas.
Newell said that as is standard, the entire case is in the beginning stages of a “detailed, lengthy investigation … to ensure that procedures were followed.”
