The Region - News from July 26, 1985

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has decided not to press charges against a Compton minister and his wife arrested May 16 on suspicion of trying to cash $379,000 in stolen and forged checks at a bank in the Florence area. Deputy Dist. Atty. Norman Shapiro said that the case against the Rev. P. J. Jones, 64, minister of the First Ever Green Missionary Baptist Church and a member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, and his wife, Mary Oreleander Jones, 33, was dropped for lack of proof that the couple knew that the checks had been stolen. Jones had told arresting sheriff’s deputies that the checks, stolen last spring from a Walnut Creek real estate investment firm, came to him anonymously through the mail.