A suspended Maryland police officer allegedly hid his 15-year-old stepson’s body in a hole in the wall in his loft, telling police officers searching for the boy the area was his “gun safe.”
Baltimore Police Officer Eric G. Banks Jr, 34, was suspended without pay on Tuesday after his arrest on charges of assaulting a police officer; he had already been suspended from duty, although it’s not clear when or why that happened, as CrimeOnline previously reported.
Anne Arundel County officers responded to Banks’s home on Tuesday when the mother of 15-year-old Dasan Jones requested a welfare check on the boy, WBFF reported. According to charging documents filed in the case, Banks initially told officers Jones wasn’t home and then consented to a search of the house. That search ended in the home’s loft, where officers found Jones’s body in a “hole in the wall with a white cover leaning on it,” the Sun said.
As officers tried to take him into custody, Banks resisted, at one point trying to disarm one of the officers, the charging documents said.
“Mr. Banks stated multiple times ‘you’re gonna have to end this’ as we were wrestling over the firearm,” the officer wrote in her report. She said it took five officers to bring him under control.
Banks was charged with first and second degree assault, reckless endangerment, trying to disarm a law officer, resisting arrest, and failure to obey a reasonable and lawful order, court records show. He was denied bond in a hearing on Thursday.
Assistant State’s Attorney Jason Miller said in court that Banks “made statements that he is homicidal and suicidal,” according to the Sun.
”He admits to officers that he moved his son’s body from one location in the home, and secreted it in another, Your Honor,” Miller said. “He has shown that he is not afraid to resort to violence.”
No charges have been filed related to Jones’s death, police said. The state medical examiner’s office is conducting an autopsy to determine Jones’s cause and manner of death, and the case is under active investigation.
According to the Sun, Banks’s wife petitioned Anne Arundel District Court Judge Ronald Karasic for a protective order against him on June 25. She complained of stalking and “emotional and mental abuse” and asked the court to order him to stay away from her, Jones, and the two sons they had together. She also requested custody of the boys.
But on June 28, Karasic denied the petition.
Jones was said to be a quiet but popular student at Glen Burnie High School, a magnet school, and was an accomplished violinist, the Sun reported.
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[Featured image: Dasan Jones/GoFundMe]
