Father Claimed His 2-Year-Old Son Was With The Amish in Mississippi. Investigators Likely Just Found The Boy’s Body
This is a strange and tragic case out of Missouri. This story does not directly involve the Amish, but nonetheless they play a particularly odd role in it.
A father who told police his missing 2-year-old son had been dropped off at an Amish community in Mississippi has been arrested. This week, in a wooded area outside Belleville, Illinois, investigators found the remains of a child they believe are his.
The father, 32-year-old Ronnell Marquese Jones Sr., had not allowed the boy’s mother to see her son since April 2024. The mother, Miranda Randazzo, told KSDK she spent more than two years trying to get someone to investigate. “They took me as a joke, they didn’t take me serious.”
The Amish drop-off story was apparently one of multiple, shifting explanations given for her son’s absence. The woman seems to have finally gotten action after taking her case from St. Louis law enforcement to a small-town police department.
Whether the police thought the Amish story was worth chasing, we don’t know. It’s an odd story on its face – especially given that Mississippi is home to just one Amish community, a small and conservative settlement of 130-or-so Swartzentruber Amish.
The Amish Community Is Not A Place You Can Just Disappear
Leaving aside how crazy it is to say you just dropped off your child with the Amish, if you wanted a story that sounded plausible, you might say Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where there are 40,000 Amish. Or somewhere in Ohio, or Indiana.
But how does someone even come up with that kind of story? Perhaps because the Amish are still seen as isolated from society, and would explain a lack of telephone contact in some people’s minds. Did this man have dealings with the Amish before, and know people in the community?
This struck me as something of a Witness movie storyline. In that 1985 film, the main character, a Philadelphia policeman, hides out in an Amish community from criminals trying to find him, while recovering from injuries. This trope of the Amish community being a place you can disappear, hidden away from prying eyes – I’m not sure if it originates with Witness, but that film did a lot to put that idea out there. And it appears to persist.
In reality, someone dropping off a child randomly at an Amish home would be widely spoken about within the community.
By the end of the day it would also filter through to the non-Amish people the community has contact with – neighbors, drivers in some cases, or customers, or people they have dealings with. The dropped-off child would quickly be reported to law enforcement, one way or another.
Mother Finally Gets Real Help From A Small-Town PD
So, it’s just a nutty idea. And the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department apparently heard this idea from Jones himself back in 2024:
SLMPD says after the initial report in 2024, they interviewed several people to try to find where the child was. The department says it tried to verify multiple and conflicting statements made by both the mother and Jones during the investigation.
One of these reports included Jones telling investigators he gave the child to an Amish community in Mississippi and he had recently seen the child. After this investigation, police say they identified a person of interest and applied for parental kidnapping charges with the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office in 2025.
That alone should have raised an eyebrow, at the least. The investigators’ you-know-what detector should go off when they hear “yeah, I left my boy with the Amish”. In this case, the Circuit Attorney’s Office asked for more information before it would file charges. But charges never came from St. Louis.
It seems that this poor mother did not get anything concrete happening until she took things to the Desloge, Missouri Police Department – located in a small town about an hour outside St. Louis.
The big-city PD had two years to make something happen, and couldn’t really move the needle in a meaningful way. For whatever reason, the small-town PD was able to swiftly take concrete action.
It’s hard to say whether swifter action may have prevented this poor boy from losing his life (assuming the body is in fact the boy’s). But maybe the mother would not have had to spend two years in limbo, wondering where her son might be.
This man and his girlfriend have been charged with parental kidnapping and harassment, and are being held without bond. No one has been charged in the child’s death, as of now. Though police believe the remains likely belong to the boy, they have not yet been formally identified.
Dropped Off With The Amish
I’m in tears.