By Kim Bell
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
CENTREVILLE, Ill. — On lonely mornings when Lillie Smith would leave for work about 5:30, she was often comforted by the sight of police Lt. Gregory Jonas, pausing in his patrol car until she got her old car started.
“He was watching over us,” she said.
On a lonely morning Tuesday, it was Smith’s turn to watch over Jonas, holding his hand, rubbing his shoulder and trying in vain to understand his dying mumbles.
Somebody shot him near her front door, but it was not clear who or why.
Centreville police called for help from the region’s Major Case Squad, which by late Tuesday had no arrests to report.
Jonas, 59, on duty and in uniform, was shot twice in the head and once in the back about 2:30 a.m. at the Ernest Smith Senior Apartments in the 4700 block of Tudor Avenue, officials said. He had been with Centreville’s police department for nearly 15 years, and neighboring Alorton’s before that.
Smith said her daughter heard the shots and woke her.
“She said, ‘Momma, somebody is shooting out here in front of our house.’”
Smith said she looked outside, saw the unmarked patrol car with its door open.
“I walked on over to where Greg was at and he was trying to mumble something to me. I said, ‘Buddy, Greg, who did this?’ He was trying to mumble something to me.”
She said she tended Jonas while a young man called for help on the car radio.
“He looked up at me, then he tried to mumble something else to me and he took a deep breath and he never said another mumbling word,” Smith said. “I just told him, ‘Hold on.’ But he couldn’t. That’s sad. That’s very sad.”
Jonas was a no-nonsense officer, she said, but also “very nice. He was the best Centreville had.”
Smith, 52, said she has lived in the apartment complex for 14 years.
“We’ve been having a lot of shootings around here,” she lamented. “Sometimes, they’ll be shooting guns up in the air. Sometimes they are shooting at each other.”
She said Jonas worked to stop the violence. “He was the one who was trying to help us solve this,” she said. “He’d stop and tell the boys on the corner to stay out of trouble.”
Deputy Police Chief James Mister said: “He was everybody’s friend, a good guy. He was well-known in the community out here. Everybody knew him to be a fair guy.”
Mister said Jonas had been on his usual rounds. “He was checking on a couple of guys when one of them came up behind him and shot him.”
Nobody else was hurt.
A lifelong resident of the apartment complex, Delano Mosley, said she awoke to flashing lights outside her window. Her heart sank, she said, when she found out what happened.
Jonas was a quiet, friendly man who would drive around the neighborhood, waving from his police car, Mosley said. He also would take time out to throw a football with the kids.
He lived in Belleville with his wife, Viola, who said Tuesday she was too distraught to talk to a reporter. Family said they have three children, including a 25-year-old son who plays minor league football in Germany.
Jonas’ mother, Vivian Whigham, 77, of Centreville, said her son had taken her to a store on Monday. She said he checked on her every morning. He was her only living child.
“He was beautiful,” she said. “If you listen to people, everybody loved him. He was good to everybody.”
For Smith, who comforted Jonas, it was another in a string of violent deaths to touch her life.
“His mother came out last night and I know her feelings because I had a son who was shot down in 2007,” she said
Danny L. Smith, 30, was slain in his car on Nov. 10, 2007, in Spanish Lake. Six months before that, her nephew, Tommy Fisher, was shot execution-style in East St. Louis.
Jonas is listed as the community’s third officer to die in the line of duty. The others were Centreville Township Constables William G. Mason and Paul Kisselbach, both in 1949.
Copyright 2009 St. Louis Post-Dispatch