SALINE CO.—That’s right…the guy who absconded with tens of thousands of dollars worth of pre-need funeral funds and will never pay a dime of it back…
Face forward, Mr. Jones…
John B. Jones.
Jones first graced the scene here at Disclosure in 2009 when we were advised that the had filched potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pre-need funds while at his job at Gaskins-Jones Funeral Home. Public records readily available soon showed that reports were true; and that Jones, as a part of the corporation that was G-JFH, was also violating his fiduciary duty toward the corp and had been taken to court over it.
Jones, we soon learned, ended up being nothing but a lowlife moocher who flitted from one female to the next (or, conversely, one family member to the next, depending upon who he was taking advantage of at the time), always living in someone else’s house or driving someone else’s car (without a license at one point in time, as it had been taken away from him for refusal to pay child support), and even at another point operating his mother’s funeral home in Equality without a license (also having been removed from him in the child support issue). None of it ever stopped Jones.
Now turn to the side….
He was only stopped when in September 2010, he was finally charged in Saline County circuit court with multiple Theft counts, dating back 7 years (which can be done as the money he stole came from an “insurance” or “trust” fund and was supposed to have been set aside for a particular purpose). He finally entered a plea in 2012, and was sent off to DOC. He is set to be released on August 30, just short of a year in prison; it ended up not quite being half of his three-year sentence.
The situation is horrific because the families he ripped off of their pre-need funeral arrangements didn’t find out the money was gone until the person who bought the pre-need package died…then the family went to make the arrangements and found there was no money set aside, some of them having been done years in advance. The loss, on top of the bereavement, left some very bitter people in and around Saline County.
What makes the situation more atrocious, besides the above fact, is that a Harrisburg woman is actually letting people know that she’s having a “welcome home party” for Jones when he gets out of lockup in Vandalia. How this man manages to take up with the women he does (this is a different one than he had when he was shipped off last year) remains beyond the grasp of many. But, that’s what’s happening. And all this without a drop of child support sent, and without a dime of restitution being made to the many, many victims in his 2010 case.