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01 — About Thomas
February 21, 1988 — May 28, 2026
Thomas E. Jones Jr.
“Dolo”
Thomas was my godbrother, a father, a Milwaukee rapper and producer, and someone whose life cannot be reduced to the way it ended.
More than a headline.
Thomas was born on February 21, 1988, and died on May 28, 2026, at 38 years old. He was known throughout Milwaukee as Dolo and released music as Pwdrbby Dolo, working as both a rapper and producer. To the people who loved him, he was also family, a father, a friend, a creative soul, and a man whose faith mattered deeply to him.
The news reports document what happened. They do not contain the fullness of who he was. The Thomas Fast is my attempt to honor that fullness through discipline, grief, memory, reflection, and creation. I committed to 459 hours of fasting—one hour for every month Thomas lived—as a tangible reminder that every life is measured by far more than the way it ends.
Read the TMJ4 report ↗Why Thomas
The fast began with grief, but the grief has opened into something much larger.
When my godbrother Thomas was shot and killed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I found myself grieving in a way that felt fundamentally different from every other loss I have experienced. It is the first deeply personal death I have encountered since arriving at a radically different understanding of life, death, consciousness, interconnectedness, and the invisible ways our lives continue to shape one another long after someone is physically gone. What surprised me most was not the depth of my grief, because I loved Thomas deeply and always will, but the nature of it. His death has felt less like disappearance and more like the realization that someone who profoundly shaped your life is no longer physically reachable while somehow remaining deeply present within it.
At the same time, I could not stop thinking about how little separated Thomas’s life from mine. We grew up in many of the same environments, exposed to many of the same realities, and I have become increasingly convinced that people do not emerge independently from circumstance in the simplistic way we often pretend they do. A different teacher. A different opportunity. A different moment of mercy. A different intervention. So many lives pivot on moments that seem insignificant at the time but ultimately become the difference between entirely different futures. Thomas’s life reminded me just how fragile that distance really is.
That realization has only reinforced the work I have been doing publicly over the last year. Whether I am writing about race, masculinity, neurodivergence, power, economics, or human behavior, I keep returning to the same conviction: I cannot separate people from the systems that cultivate them. Accountability matters, and so do consequences, but understanding why something happened is not the same thing as excusing it. I have come to believe that compassion and accountability are not competing values. They are two truths that often have to exist together.
The Thomas Fast was born from that tension. For 459 hours—one hour for every month Thomas lived—I am undertaking a water fast, consuming only water while stepping away from distraction, routine, and ordinary consumption to create space for grief, reflection, prayer, writing, creative work, and deeper understanding. It is not about punishment or proving endurance. It is about honoring a life that continues to teach me that every headline conceals a human being, every statistic contains a story, and every person exists inside systems far more complicated than we usually allow ourselves to acknowledge. My hope is that this project encourages people to become a little slower to judge, a little quicker to understand, and a little more willing to sit with complexity before reaching certainty.