A Story That Changed Every Time: The Disappearance of Kyon Jones

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

February 11, 2026

Kyon Jones was only two months old when he disappeared from an apartment in the 1500 block of Benning Road Northeast in Washington, D.C., in early May 2021. His case would never involve any kind of kidnapping or stranger danger in the way so many missing child cases do. Instead, it unfolded almost entirely within his own small apartment, through a series of shifting explanations from his mother that each fell apart under scrutiny, until she finally admitted what had actually happened, an admission that still, years later, has not led investigators to Kyon's remains.

A Series of Stories

Kyon lived with his mother, Ladonia Patrice Boggs, at the apartment on Benning Road. On May 4, 2021, Boggs contacted Kyon's father, Carl Bernard Jones, and told him to come pick up the baby along with his belongings. When family members and eventually investigators began asking where Kyon actually was, Boggs did not give a single consistent answer. She first claimed that a woman from child protective services had come to the apartment and taken custody of the infant, telling police this woman had left with Kyon's car seat, clothes, and formula in a blue Toyota. When investigators contacted Child and Family Services directly, the agency confirmed it had never taken custody of Kyon and had no record of any such visit. Boggs then shifted her account, telling people she had given the baby to her own godmother. When that explanation also failed to hold up, she offered yet another version, claiming she had given Kyon to a woman living on Good Hope Road, though she said she could no longer provide that woman's contact information because she had deleted it from her phone.

The Admission

On May 8, several days into an investigation that had already exposed multiple inconsistent stories, Boggs finally told investigators what she said had actually happened. She said she had been sleeping in the same bed as Kyon and woke to find her own body positioned on top of him, with the infant unresponsive beneath her. Rather than calling 911 or taking Kyon to a hospital, she said she wrapped his body in a blanket and placed it in a dumpster near the apartment complex. She told investigators she had been under the influence of PCP at the time and that panic had driven her decision not to seek any kind of medical or emergency assistance once she realized something was wrong.

What the Cameras Showed

Surveillance footage from the apartment complex corroborated at least part of this account, showing Boggs carrying an infant car seat, a plastic bag, and a cardboard box large enough to hold a two month old baby, moving in the direction of the property's dumpster. Investigators came to believe that Kyon's body had subsequently been transported, likely along with the rest of the complex's collected trash, to a landfill in Charles City County, Virginia, located outside Richmond. Law enforcement in Virginia conducted searches of that landfill in the hope of recovering Kyon's remains. Those searches turned up nothing.

A Murder Charge That Didn't Hold

In the immediate aftermath of her admission, Boggs was arrested and initially charged with murder in connection with Kyon's death. That charge did not ultimately survive prosecutorial review. Investigators and prosecutors determined that the available evidence, while sufficient to establish that Boggs had disposed of her infant son's body rather than seeking help, was not sufficient to support a murder charge specifically, since it remained unclear whether Kyon's death itself had been caused intentionally or had resulted from an accidental overlay while Boggs slept, impaired, in the same bed. Prosecutors instead moved forward with a charge of tampering with evidence, reflecting the act of concealment and disposal rather than an allegation that she had deliberately killed him. Boggs was released on bail while this charge remained pending.

A Second Tragedy in the Same Complex

The case took an unexpected and violent turn roughly a year later. In April 2022, while the evidence tampering charge against her was still pending, Ladonia Boggs was found stabbed to death inside an apartment within the very same complex where Kyon had disappeared. Investigators identified Carl Bernard Jones, Kyon's own father, as the person responsible. According to the account that emerged from the investigation, Carl went to Boggs's apartment at 12:40 a.m. on April 27, where the two became engaged in an argument specifically about their son's death the previous year. That argument escalated, and Carl admitted to stabbing Boggs in the abdomen during the confrontation.

A Father's Plea

Officers responding to the scene on April 27, 2022, at around 2:52 a.m. found 39 year old Ladonia Boggs suffering from a stab wound inside the apartment. She did not survive. The Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force arrested 44 year old Carl Jones that same day, initially on a charge of second degree murder while armed. Jones was later allowed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter as part of a negotiated deal calling for a sentence between seven and nine years. In September 2022, he formally entered that guilty plea, and in December 2022, he was sentenced to nine years in prison for killing the mother of his own child, a sentence that closed the legal chapter connected to Boggs's death even as it left Kyon's own case, and the question of where his remains might actually be, no closer to resolution.

A Case Frozen in Place

With Ladonia Boggs's death in 2022, the evidence tampering charge that had been pending against her in connection with Kyon's disappearance was effectively rendered moot, since there was no longer a living defendant to prosecute. This left Kyon's case in an unusual and painful state of suspension, a situation where the person who admitted to disposing of his body was never able to face any charge more serious than evidence tampering, and where that limited legal accountability disappeared entirely once she herself was killed, all without Kyon's remains ever having been recovered from the Virginia landfill investigators believe still holds them.

Still Missing

More than three years after Kyon Jones's disappearance began with a series of stories that each collapsed under scrutiny, before ending with an admission that led investigators toward a landfill rather than an arrest for murder, his remains have never been found. His mother, the only person who ever offered any account of what happened to him, was killed by his own father before the legal system could fully resolve even the lesser charge she faced in connection with his death. What remains of Kyon's case is a series of unanswered questions layered on top of one another, a child whose body was never recovered, a mother whose limited legal accountability ended with her own violent death, and a father now serving a prison sentence for a killing that grew directly out of the unresolved grief and anger surrounding his infant son's disappearance.

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