‘It just reopened wounds’: Mother speaks out after man admits to shooting, killing her son in 2022

PITTSBURGH — Oneka Jones was in the courtroom Wednesday when a man admitted to killing her son more than two years ago.

The heartbroken mother said the shooter, Akeyba Sanchez, did not show any remorse and never apologized for taking her son, Willis Brooks, 29, from her.

“It just cut me like a knife all over again,” Jones said. “It didn’t give me any pleasure. It didn’t give me happiness. It didn’t give me closure. It didn’t give me justice. It gave me more pain.”

Jones said her son’s killer will get to live and see his family behind bars but she will never get her son back.

“It just reopened wounds,” she said. “It just reopened the heartbreak. No mom should have to go through this.”

>> ‘He loved everyone:’ Mother remembers son who was killed while working security at local club

With tears streaming down her face, Jones showed Channel 11′s Antoinette DelBel the necklace with her son’s face she wears close to her heart. She said it was a gift from a mother who lost her child to gun violence.

“This gave me a little bit of hope in my heart,” she said. “I fight to breathe every day because I miss my son.”

Brooks was a certified state constable who was working security at a club on Pittsburgh’s South Side when two men shot him on March 18, 2022.

“I want the world to know my son was a good person,” Jones said. “He was a protector. All he wanted to do is protect.”

>> Local mom who lost son to gun violence bakes birthday cakes for families of other victims

Brooks was also a school security guard and a loving father of five girls. His mother said he never got to meet his youngest who’s now 2.

“She never got to hear her dad’s voice,” said Jones. “She never got a chance to see what an amazing dad he is. The love he had in his heart for her.”

That kind of love for her son will always be in her heart. As for the pain, she’s channeled that into baking. It’s part of a foundation she started in his name – the Willis De’Marr Foundation - to help other families who’ve lost loved ones to senseless gun violence.

“It gives me a little bit of hope, not justice because you don’t really get justice in the end. You get a closed case,” Jones said.

Sanchez will be sentenced in three months. The other man in the case, Deontay Patrick, was sentenced to 11 to 22 years in prison.

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