WASHINGTON — A Washington, D.C., man who shot the mother of his children more than 20 times inside her apartment — with eight children in the home and a protective order in force against him — will spend 45 years in prison. Wonell Jones Jr., 38, was sentenced on Friday, October 30, in D.C. Superior Court for the July 19, 2022 murder of Audora Williams, 33, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro announced. Superior Court Judge J. Michael Ryan ordered the 45-year term to be followed by five years of supervised release.

Source: U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Columbia (DOJ)

The sentence closes a case that began more than four years ago. A jury found Jones guilty on July 16, 2026, of one count of first-degree murder while armed, one count of possession of a firearm during a crime of violence, and two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. The verdict release, issued at the time, records that Judge Ryan had scheduled this sentencing for October 30 — the date the term was imposed. The case number is 2022 CF1 006394.

What happened on July 19, 2022

According to the government's evidence, in the afternoon of July 19, 2022, Jones returned to Audora Williams' apartment, in the 2900 block of Knox Place in Southeast Washington, following a grocery run with one of her young sons. Surveillance video shows Jones entering the building and the apartment with Williams's child. Inside the apartment there were eight children: three of Jones's children, three of Williams's children, and a toddler and a baby shared by Jones and Williams. The children are not named in the court reporting, and Awaaz Punjab does not identify them.

Jones was not supposed to be at the home or in contact with Williams at all: she had a temporary protective order against him, and a protective-order trial was scheduled just days later. Shortly after returning, prosecutors say, Jones closed the door to Williams's room and began a loud argument with her, accusing her of cheating. His screaming grew louder and angrier, and then gunshots rang out. Jones partially stepped out of the room and fired more shots before fleeing the apartment, leaving the children behind. Williams was shot more than 20 times with two different guns and succumbed to her injuries.

'Audora Williams was shot more than twenty times with two guns, an act of violence as staggering as it is senseless,' said U.S. Attorney Pirro in announcing the sentence. 'The defendant fled, but he did not outrun justice. His capture and return to the District make clear that those who commit this level of brutality will be held to account, and today he is going to prison for it.' At the verdict in July, her office had put the protective-order breach at the centre of the case, saying Jones 'flouted a protective order, put in place to keep Audora Williams and her children safe, and proceeded to murder Williams, with her children just feet away.'

The trial, as the courtroom heard it

Independent courtroom reporting by DC Witness, which covered the trial in July, adds what the official releases leave out. At closing arguments on July 15, prosecutors described a 'cycle of violence': Williams had filed for a Temporary Protective Order and a Civil Protective Order in May 2022, according to prosecutors, and she had obtained custody of the couple's two shared children only a few days before her death, medical examiners' records were cited for the wound count, and prosecutors used a pen-clicking demonstration to illustrate the number of shots they said Jones fired. The defence, led by attorney Steven Kiersh, countered that a man shown on surveillance walking in with a child and groceries was not shown to have planned a murder, and challenged a son's testimony by pointing to his earlier grand jury statements. The jury sided with the prosecution on every count.

The manhunt after the shooting was brief but crossed state lines. Jones was arrested in Florida on August 29, 2022 — six weeks after the murder — extradited to the District of Columbia on October 26, 2022, and has remained in custody ever since, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. Joining Friday's announcement was Interim Chief Jeffery Carroll of the Metropolitan Police Department; Pirro and Carroll commended the MPD investigators who worked the case, and thanked Assistant U.S. Attorneys Zach Horton and Shaniqua Butler, who prosecuted it.

Cases like this one are why protective orders, and what happens when they are defied, sit at the hardest edge of American domestic-violence law: on paper, the order against Jones was in force, with its own trial days away, and it still did not keep him out of that apartment. What the system could do came afterwards — a cross-state arrest, a jury that heard the children were feet away, and now a 45-year sentence that means Jones, 38, will be an old man before any release. For Awaaz Punjab's readers in the Washington area and beyond, the detail that matters most is the one prosecutors repeated at both the verdict and the sentencing: help and legal protection existed in this case, and the failure was in a man choosing to defy it — a distinction that matters for every family weighing whether seeking an order is worth it. The record of this case says it created the paper trail that helped convict him.