GRAND BLANC, Mich. – The family of Jacob Hills want answers about what happened to the recent high school graduate.
Officials say Hills went out with friends on Saturday, July 23, and was supposed to help his dad the next Sunday. They started searching for Hills when he didn’t answer his family’s phone calls.
Police made the tragic discovery early Monday morning.
Officials say Hills was heading to the Army National Guard in two weeks. However, he went to Dearborn Heights to party with a friend and ended up murdered in the laundry room of a Detroit apartment building, officials said.
Update: Police: Grand Blanc teen found shot to death in apartment basement wasn’t ‘lured’ to Detroit
Hills’ entire family spent Sunday and part of Monday morning searching for the teen until his body was found shot multiple times in the apartment building in the basement laundry room.
“He was leaving to go to the National Guard, the Army division,” said Jacob Hills’ mother, Sadie Hills. “He would do any and everything for anybody; it did not matter.”
His car was found outside a hookah lounge in Dearborn Heights. The AR-15 he’d received for a graduation gift was gone.
Jacob Hills’ family believes he was lured down to Dearborn Heights under the guise of partying with new so-called friends. Officials say the teen had recently broken up with a girlfriend and was feeling pretty low before leaving for the Army National Guard.
Sadie Hills believes the object was to steal his gun and the money that he’d gotten for graduation. The family working the streets found and led police to where the teen’s body was discovered, which was very close to the Detroit-Dearborn Heights border.
“He wasn’t down there to cause trouble, and he wasn’t down there to buy a gun, of all things,” Sadie Hills said.
“He wasn’t down there to buy drugs,” said family friend Kristie Lang.
“He was down there because he was lured,” Sadie Hills said.
Officials say the friend who was with Jacob Hills is a 17-year-old boy from Oxford.
The Hills family says the teenager’s story about the events going into Saturday and Sunday has changed multiple times, gaining the attention of the Detroit police, who say they would like to speak to him as well.
Anyone with information on who Hills was with is asked to call Detroit police at 313-596-2260.