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Trainer's Funeral Features Horse-Drawn Hearse

Tribune photo by GREG FIGHT

Jesse T. Jones, a horse trainer who won the Premiere Stakes at Tampa Bay Downs, was laid to rest Monday. Joseph Mangano of Downtown Horse and Carriage drives his Percheron horses pulling a custom-made hearse containing Jones’ casket

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By YVETTE C. HAMMETT, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 12, 2008

Updated: 02/11/2008 11:46 pm

BRANDON - Jesse T. Jones loved horses. He whispered and they listened, for more than 30 years.

On Monday, the 80-year-old Tampa man was carried to his final resting place aboard a glass hearse pulled by two regal white Percherons. It could not have been a better ending for a man who spent much of his life in an orphanage and found his purpose spending three decades training race horses at Tampa Bay Downs, his family said.

Bagpipes played as the horse-drawn carriage led a procession down shady, oak-lined paths at Hillsboro Memorial Gardens. "He would have loved this," said his son, Mike Jones.

After retiring as an Arkansas state trooper in 1977, Jones was ready for his second career. "I can't even tell you how many horses he trained," said his wife, Jonell Jones. "Hundreds, at least."

He was self-taught, studying horse anatomy and medicine until he became an expert, she said. In the 1980s, he won the Premiere Stakes at Tampa Bay Downs for the work he did with a horse named Northern Dundee.

His final send-off came about by happenstance, said Todd Miller, a sales manager for cemetery owners Dignity Memorial. Joe Mangano, owner of Downtown Horse and Carriage in Polk City, recently signed a contract with Dignity to provide a horse-drawn hearse for funerals. Jones was the first to use it at the Brandon funeral home.

Reporter Yvette C. Hammett can be reached at (813) 657-4532 or at yhammett@tampatrib.com.

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