Loving mother wanted to help relative who eventually killed her

It was in Jamie Baker’s nature to be helpful. So when she met Danny Jones, 49, at a family gathering last year and he told her he needed an in-home caretaker, she volunteered for the paid job.

Baker, a mother of two, traveled from Victorville to South L.A. for days at a time to care for Jones, a relative of her mother’s. But in recent months, she became afraid, her mother said.

Baker told her family that Jones padlocked the doors and would hold her captive. He’d take her phone and change the password.

“He had to be the one to let her in and out of the house,” said her mother, Lisa Baker.

Lisa Baker thinks that her daughter continued seeing Jones out of concern and because she wanted to trust him as family. But he was addicted to methamphetamines, she said, and tried to turn Jamie Baker into an addict.

Two days before she was killed, Jamie Baker called her 15-year-old son. She told him she didn’t know if she would make it home alive, but she loved him.

On March 11, Jamie Baker called her mother and told her she wanted to come home. Concerned for her daughter’s safety, Lisa Baker called the police multiple times over the course of the afternoon and evening.

When police finally responded, they could raise no one inside the home in the 100 block of West 109th Street.

A SWAT team later determined that Jones had barricaded himself inside and was armed.

Early the next morning, police used a robot to enter the home and found Jamie Baker shot to death. In the attic, Jones had turned the gun on himself.

Lisa Baker is now raising her two grandsons. On prom night for one of the boys, she thought about how much their mother would have loved to be there.

“Jamie was a really loving mom,” Lisa Baker said. “She loved her boys.”

Contact the Homicide Report. Follow @nicolesantacruz and @latimeshomicide on Twitter.

This post was part of a May 1, 2019 article describing violence in South L.A. in the wake of the Nipsey Hussle killing.