SF Community Reunites Homicide Victim's Dog With Family

This is outside my beat entirely, but some stories deserve attention regardless of where the byline usually falls.

Carl Jones, Jr. grew up in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, lost both parents before he turned 18, navigated the foster care system, and still managed to pull a 4.0 GPA. His sister told Mission Local he toured HBCUs and had his pick of schools. Life, as it does for too many young people who grew up without a safety net, had other plans.

On March 3, Jones was shot near Sixth and Mission streets in SoMa, outside the Henry Hotel on Sixth Street where he lived. He was 43 years old. He died at a hospital shortly after. Police arrested 33-year-old Siaosi Aleamotuay the same day. The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office has since charged Aleamotuay with murder, with an allegation that he personally used a deadly firearm, plus one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Surveillance footage, according to prosecutors, shows Aleamotuay removing a gun from his backpack, crossing the street, and shooting Jones, who did not appear to be armed. No motive has been made public.

Jones did not die alone on that block. He had his dog with him.

Teddy Graham, a small dog Jones called Teddy G, ran into the street in distress after the shooting. Charles Toyner, a neighbor walking up Sixth Street that morning, heard two gunshots and ducked behind a pole. When he emerged, he saw Teddy G and caught him. Toyner told officers on the scene he would take care of the dog.

What happened next says something about the pockets of community that survive in SoMa despite everything the neighborhood has absorbed over the years.

Toyner reached out to the Gubbio Project, a nonprofit that operates at the intersection of faith and street-level outreach in San Francisco. Rio Amor, a drug-overdose educator and substance-abuse specialist at the organization, helped Toyner track down Jones’s family. Terry Morris, an outreach worker at Gubbio, told Mission Local that Jones was remembered in the community for his “bright eyes” and warm presence, and that people who knew him understood how much Teddy G meant to him.

Multiple people who encountered Teddy G in the days after the shooting offered to adopt him. Amor kept working the phones.

The following day, Amor reached Jones’s sister Amelia in San Jose. She and other relatives drove to San Francisco and brought Teddy Graham home.

“He never lost his big heart,” Amelia said of her brother in the Mission Local piece. “He was always loving. He always had a smile on his face. He would give you advice, and it would always be supportive.”

Jones’s biography reads like a case study in what this city and this country does to Black children who lose their parents young. He lost his father at 16. He lost his mother two years after that. His family struggled with food security and stable housing. He cycled through the foster care system and spent time at Edgewood, a group home in Ingleside. Despite all of it, his academic record showed a kid who was paying attention, who had something to prove.

The reasons he ended up at the Henry Hotel on Sixth Street rather than a college campus somewhere are not mysterious. They are structural. They are the same reasons SoMa’s Sixth Street corridor has become a place where people fall through every crack the city failed to patch.

His death has not generated the kind of citywide conversation it probably should. Homicides in this corridor rarely do, unless the politics demand it.

What did generate something real was a neighbor who caught a scared dog, a nonprofit worker who made calls until she found a phone number in San Jose, and a family that drove up from the South Bay to take Teddy Graham home.

Carl Jones, Jr. was remembered by the people who knew him as someone with a warm smile and genuine care for others. His dog is with his family now. That matters. It does not fix anything, but it matters.