A Baltimore mother sought a second protection order against her police officer husband just hours before her 15-year-old son’s body was found in a hole in the wall in her husband’s home.
Dasan Jones’s mother filed her first petition for a protective order against Baltimore Police Officer Eric Banks Jr on June 25, but Anne Arundel County District Court Judge Ronald Karasic denied that request three days later, as CrimeOnline previously reported.
A judge granted the second petition, however, at a 3 p.m. hearing on Tuesday, the Baltimore Sun reported. Two hours later, Anne Arundel County police officers found Dasan’s body “in a hole in the wall with a white covering leaning on it,” upstairs in a loft in his stepfather’s home.
Banks, 34, has been suspended without pay pending the investigation and is being held without bond on charges related to assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. Baltimore police said he’d already been suspended from his official duties, but they declined to say when or why that happened.
The state medical examiner is still working to determine the cause and manner of Dasan’s death, and no charges have been filed related to that, police said.
As she had in the petition she filed in June, Banks’s wife cited “emotional abuse” in the second request for a protective order, the Sun reported. Additionally, she said that she believed Banks had taken her son’s phone and was texting her from it. She said she had been staying at a hotel and received text messages from Dasan’s phone asking her to come to the house.
“I then receive a call from my niece stating that my son messaged her from Instagram say that Eric took his phone the night of the 4th and he didn’t know why, and I was receiving texts that weren’t from him,” she wrote.
She accused Banks of changing her bank and Verizon account passwords as well.
“I am in fear for my life and well being because Eric Banks keeps trying to control, follow, and emotionally abuse myself and my sons,” she wrote.
In the first petition, she requested custody of Dasan and the two sons she had with Banks as well as an order that he stay away from all of them. She accused Banks of stalking her and asked the judge to order him to undergo counseling.
After the hearing on Tuesday, Dasan’s mother called police and told them she was in the area to pick up Dasan and asked them to check on him. Banks told the officers that Dasan had left, taking nothing with him, and then consented to a search of the house. When officers got to the loft, Banks told them the area behind the wall was his “gun safe,” but that’s where they found the teen’s body.
As officers tried to take him into custody, he fought, at one point trying to take an officer’s gun from its holster and telling her, “You’re going to have to end this.”
The Sun reported that Banks had filed a peace order against his wife in May, claiming she was threatening to leave him and ruin his life. But he withdrew that petition two days later.
Tiffany Binford, a relative of Banks’ wife speaking on her behalf, told the Sun that she believed Banks’s position as a police officer gave him “the upper hand.”
Banks has served on the Baltimore Police force for three years. Prior to that, he served in the US Marine Corps for 11 years.
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[Featured image: Dasan Jones/GoFundMe]
