A School in Shock : Police, Family, Friends Can Find No Motive for Killing of Student and Teacher

On Friday, the halls at John Muir High School in Pasadena were unusually quiet--even though the varsity football team would be playing for the CIF’s Coastal Conference championship in the evening.

Most students did not go to class, and school officials did not force them to.

Instead, they stood in clusters, silently reading newspapers that said teacher Robert E. Jones, 47, and student Ronald McClendon, 17, had been shot to death the day before, apparently as they slept, in Jones’ home in Lower Hastings Ranch.

McClendon had good grades, was a promising athlete and popular among his classmates.

Jones was one of the most respected teachers at Muir on the city’s west side, a confidant and adviser to many of the school’s 1,200 students.

No one--including, police, family and friends--can understand why someone would want to kill them.

Detectives were still without clues Friday. There were no signs of forced entry into the home, nothing apparently was taken and the residence was not ransacked, they said.

‘Kind of a Mystery’

“Its really kind of a mystery to us. We’re really kind of puzzled,” Sgt. Frank McPherson said. “We can’t find anything in their backgrounds that says either one of them are bad guys.”

Neighbors said they had seen and heard nothing out of the ordinary before the bodies were discovered Thursday morning by police and Muir security guards.

“This is an upper-middle-class neighborhood, where we don’t have many burglaries or any kind of trouble,” McPherson said. “It just doesn’t fit.

“The kid’s pretty clean-cut. Mom and dad and him had gotten into some kind of argument. (Jones) let him bunk up in his house.”

In her home near the high school, McClendon’s mother, Brenda Johnson, sat in her den Friday afternoon, clad in a red bathrobe and fighting back tears.

A devout Jehovah’s Witness, Johnson said she blamed her son’s death on his rebellion against the strict doctrines of their religion. A rebellion, she said, that caused conflict in their home and drove her son, a junior varsity basketball player, to leave three months ago.

“We follow the Bible’s principles in this house,” she said. “My son, being a teen-ager, felt that the Bible’s counsel was too restrictive.”

Johnson said her son had an early curfew and was not allowed to date. They had also argued, she said, over his choice of friends.

She has no idea who killed him.

“I’ve been asked that a thousand times,” Johnson said. “I really don’t know.”

McClendon stayed with her sister for about two months, Johnson said, then moved in with Jones four weeks ago.

“I told him that he could not stay there,” she recalled. “But he said would run away, that he would sleep on the street.

“Mr. Jones called me and told me that Ronnie was OK and that he would make sure that Ronnie would get to school. I appreciated that,” she said.

Johnson said she was attempting to work out an agreement for her son to return home.

Johnson, who is divorced from McClendon’s father, is now married to Kermit Johnson, a former football star at UCLA who played professionally with the San Francisco 49ers and the Southern California Sun before retiring in 1978 to become a Pasadena firefighter.

“Ronnie thought that he would have more freedom with Mr. Jones,” she said. “Now look at him.”

Johnson said the last time she talked to her son was about two weeks ago, when he called to speak with his younger brother, Eugene, 16. Although McClendon was no longer living at home, Johnson said she sent his lunch to school every day with Eugene.

‘I Love You’

“I had written him a note,” she said, and packed it with his lunch on Wednesday. “It said ‘I love you very much and I want you to always remember that I’m your very best friend. Please don’t wait too long to remember that,’ ” she recounted.

“The next day he was dead.”

Muir Principal Jim Charles said he sent two guards to Jones’ house Thursday morning after the teacher failed to show up for work at 8 a.m., something that Jones “would just never do without calling.”

The guards summoned police after they got no response from knocking on the door. Jones’ car was parked in the driveway.

Inside the one-story home, police found McClendon, still clad in his basketball uniform from Wednesday night’s game, in a sleeping bag on the living room couch. He had been shot once in the head and in the body. Jones’ body was found in his bed in the bedroom. He had been shot in the same fashion, police said.

Taught Social Sciences

Jones had been a teacher with the Pasadena Unified School District for 25 years. He had been at Muir, where he was the head of the social sciences department and an assistant track coach, since 1975.

Revered by both students and faculty, Jones had taken students into his home in the past when they had no other place to go.

“He’s been doing that as long as I’ve know him,” said Sheila Burd, director of girls’ athletics, who graduated from Muir with Jones in 1956. “We were real good friends. Everyone liked him. He was just a real warm, caring and friendly person.”

Jones had never been married, Burd said, and devoted his life to his teaching and his students.

Assistant Principal Don Cook, who said he had known Jones since childhood, said Friday that Jones “was just a lovely guy. He loved to play the horses at Santa Anita. He talked to those kids like a father. If they needed chewing out, he’d chew them out.”

In 1984 Jones was given the Payne Humanitarian Award by Phi Delta Kappa, a national educational fraternity.

The Muir football team dedicated its game Friday night against Hart High School to the memories of Jones and McClendon.