NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A New Orleans police crime lab technician was called to a crime scene to photograph a shooting victim, only to realize that the dead man was her ex-boyfriend and father of her child.
Thirty-one-year-old Jonathan Dotson Sr. was killed early Saturday morning in a home under construction, The Times-Picayune/NOLA.com reports (http://goo.gl/ONqfWP).
Crime lab technician Alonia Singleton said she was photographing the scene when she saw the shooting victim’s tattoos and began to realize who he was.
Before the victim was placed in a body bag, she asked others there if he had the name, “Alonia,” tattooed on his chest.
He did.
“I started backing up,” she said Thursday at the Treme funeral home where family and friends gathered to say goodbye to Dotson. “It was like this heavy weight. I kept not believing it.”
Singleton said that after discovering Dotson was the victim, she drove to his mother’s home to deliver the devastating news.
“I didn’t cry because I really didn’t believe it,” the victim’s mother Sheila Dotson said.
Jonathan Dotson and Singleton had met in high school and dated for about five years. They have an 8-year-old son.
Dotson, a New Orleans native, worked at various French Quarter restaurants. His current girlfriend, Likera Lee, says he had been trying to find work as an actor. Shortly before his death, he had portrayed a shooting victim in an independent film called “A Quiet Storm.”
“It’s a surreal blurring of reality and fiction,” the film’s writer and director Jason Affolder said of Dotson’s death.
New Orleans police have not publicly disclosed a motive or possible suspects in Dotson’s death.
___