Deputy renews plea for witnesses in 11-year-old Klamath murder case

Eleven years after a 13-year-old boy was shot in the head on Klamath Avenue, a Del Norte County deputy has reopened the plea for witnesses in a case that has never been solved.

Dante RomanNose-Jones was shot on the 100-block of Klamath Avenue in Klamath on May 1, 2015. He was first taken to Sutter Coast Hospital in Crescent City, then transferred to an Oakland-area hospital, where he died of his injuries. The killing has remained unresolved for more than a decade, leaving no one held accountable for the death of a child whose name is still remembered in Klamath and across the North Coast.

At the time, Del Norte County Sheriff Erik Apperson said local agencies would pool resources and exhaust every effort to pursue the case. The Del Norte County Sheriff’s Department also arrested a 16-year-old male in connection with the shooting, but the District Attorney’s Office filed no charges, and the investigation stayed open.

Now, Del Norte County Sheriff’s deputy Maia Mello is leading a renewed push for justice and asking witnesses to finally come forward. The renewed effort gives the case fresh attention after years in which the file remained one more painful example of a homicide that never reached court.

Dante’s mother, Martha Romannose, never gave up. Her persistence has kept the case alive in community memory, even as the investigation moved through an uneven path of arrests, no charges and no public resolution. The renewed appeal also reflects a broader reality on the North Coast: families in rural and Native communities often live for years with unanswered questions when a killing stalls before trial.

Humboldt County’s official unsolved-cases page says its list is updated when new information or progress is received, and that cases being investigated by other agencies will not appear there. That makes cases like Dante RomanNose-Jones’s harder to track in one place, even as they continue to matter deeply to families, tribal communities and residents who watch for signs that older crimes will not be forgotten.

The case has also remained part of wider tribal and community discussions about missing and murdered Indigenous people in the North Coast region. For Klamath, Crescent City and the Yurok reservation, the renewed plea asks the same question that has lingered since 2015: whether someone who knows what happened will finally speak.