Marine targeted for child porn

[thedrifter]

Marine targeted for child porn

By JACOB FENTON
The Intelligencer

Federal investigators were looking for evidence of child pornography when they raided a former Marine’s Hilltown home Monday night, touching off a fatal shooting.

But whether Darius Hill, 39, a veteran of the first Iraq war described as a “mountain of a man,” killed himself or died from one of the five gunshot wounds inflicted by law enforcement, was still unclear Wednesday.

Bucks County Coroner Dr. Joseph Campbell said Hill died of gunshot wounds, one of which was self-inflicted, but didn’t have a conclusive answer as to which bullet caused his death.

Hill, a 1986 Pennridge High School graduate, was shot six times in his bedroom Monday just before 7 p.m. after FBI agents executed a federal search warrant, authorities said.

His most grievous wounds were gunshots to the mouth and chest, officials said. The shot to the mouth was believed to be the self-inflicted one, whereas the other gunshots came from law officers’ guns.

On Wednesday, the FBI stepped back from its earlier statement that a coroner’s report showed conclusively Hill shot himself to death.

“The information we had was premature and that we now realize that the coroner had not made a final determination,” said FBI spokeswoman Jerri Williams.

Friends and family said they couldn’t believe the dedicated father of two young daughters would have committed suicide in the bedroom of the Callowhill Road home where he grew up. The sketchy narrative provided so far doesn’t add up, according to Hill’s mother.

Hill’s wife was told that he had put a gun into his mouth in the tense situation, friends and family said.

Bucks County District Attorney Michelle Henry said the warrants were granted for an investigation into possession and distribution of child pornography. She wouldn’t say anything about the shooting besides stating that an investigation was ongoing.

Steven Gamvroulas, an agent in the Utah Attorney General’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, said he’d received about 700 pieces of child pornography by e-mail from Hill specifically.

As an undercover agent, Gamvroulas joined a network that shared such images, and said he was just one member of many receiving the e-mails. Hill was not suspected of producing the pornography, Gamvroulas said.

Hill’s computer was seized, according to his mother, Eileen Hill, but she rejected the idea that he was involved in anything illegal. “My son’s not a seller of child pornography,” she said.

Hill said her family had hired a lawyer and expected answers to the unanswered questions surrounding his death. “Frankly, he was murdered,” she said.

“Even if you committed a murder they don’t have the right to come in and murder you and say you did it to yourself,” she said. “If you shot yourself in the mouth, why would they shoot you? And if they shot you first, how could you shoot yourself in the mouth?”

A FBI shooting review team is examining the incident, and Bucks County detectives are conducting their own inquiry, but neither had any new details to share Wednesday.

County detectives were not involved in the raid, so they are a “neutral party,” Campbell said.


Eileen Hill gave this account of the events:

Darius Hill had just finished working out on a treadmill and was going upstairs to take a shower when the doorbell rang. The family had ordered a pizza, and his two young daughters, ages 3 and 5, ran toward the door. Hill’s wife, Rebecca, answered the door and found FBI agents outside.

Agents told Rebecca Hill they had a search warrant, but wouldn’t say what they were looking for, and pushed past her into the house. When they realized her husband was home they went upstairs to the bedroom. Rebecca Hill heard voices, but not any shots.

Soon afterward, Hilltown police escorted Rebecca Hill and her two daughters to a squad car outside and later drove her to the police station. Only several hours later did they tell her that her husband had died.

Hill’s mother said she was sure her son didn’t shoot at police. A former Marine and veteran of the first Iraq war, “he was a crack shot. If he had fired first one of them would have ended up on the floor with him,” she said.

A friend said that at 6 feet 4 inches tall, Darius Hill was a “moving mountain of a man” and a fearless Marine. “He drove the lead tank in the center column going into Kuwait City” during the first Iraq war, said the friend, who asked not to be named.

His mother said Darius had joined the Marines straight out of high school and served for a dozen years, rising to staff sergeant.

Marine records say he was dishonorably discharged as a private. News reports from 1997 said Hill was one of six Marines accused of stealing and selling military munitions, but a friend said he fought that in a court case that was appealed to U.S. District Court.

After the Marines, Hill worked as a carpentry contractor and met his wife, who worked in the mortgage industry, in North Carolina. They moved into the house Hill had grown up in Hilltown about seven years ago, according to his mother. A military history buff with expertise in diving and explosives, he loved hunting and building things with his hands, she said.

Sheila Thoder, a family friend and the bookkeeper for Hill’s contracting business, said he was proud of his daughters. “He adored them, and he was such an upbeat person. If anybody ever had any problems or something wasn’t going well, he’d always be the one to say everything is going to work out,” she said.

“His wife is just inconsolable,” said Thoder. “She’s devastated — absolutely devastated. One minute she was planning on what to have dinner with her husband — the next she was taken out and dragged to a police station. A few hours later was told her husband was dead.”

Eileen Hill said she had to tell her granddaughters they’d never see their father again.

The eldest daughter was stunned, Hill said.

“ ‘Daddy was going to take me to Chuck E. Cheese’s for my birthday’ … and then she cried. She said, ‘We were supposed to go camping this summer.’ It just tore me apart. I thought — oh my,” she said.

January 31, 2008 12:24 AM

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Ex-Marine’s family seeks second autopsy

By HILARY BENTMAN
The Intelligencer

Authorities are still trying to determine if former Marine Darius Hill died by his own hand, or if the fatal shot came from FBI agents sent to search his home for evidence of child pornography.

And while law enforcement agencies continue their investigation, the family of the 39-year-old Hilltown man has started its own.

Hill’s family has hired Doylestown attorney Greg Mitsch and is proceeding with plans to have a second autopsy performed. Dr. William Manion, a pathologist and Burlington County, N.J., deputy medical examiner, could carry out the autopsy as early as this weekend.

Mitsch said the preliminary report from the first autopsy has not been released, but the family had only a small window to pursue a second medical examination.

“We want to make sure the autopsies are in agreement and if not, why aren’t they?” said Mitsch, of Benstead & Mabon. “We don’t have the preliminary report yet … so there is nothing to have issue with.”

A family requesting a second autopsy is not that unusual, said Bucks County Coroner Joseph Campbell.

Hill died Monday in his Callowhill Road home after federal agents arrived to search for any computers, cameras, documents, notebooks or records indicating he possessed or distributed child pornography.

Shots were fired, and the dishonorably discharged Persian Gulf veteran was struck by six bullets. One was to his mouth that authorities have determined was self-inflicted. The other five hit his chest, torso, thigh and thumb, said Campbell.

Exactly which shot was the fatal one remains uncertain.

Campbell said investigators have to figure out the sequence of the shots, which cannot be determined solely by medical examinations. Interviews and other investigative work are needed before an official ruling.

“We will rely heavily on the work of county detectives,” said Campbell.

On Jan. 25, a federal judge in Philadelphia signed off on a search warrant of Hill’s home.

The document, released by the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office on Thursday, gave agents the ability to search and seize items used to view, distribute, receive or store child pornography, including computer hardware, disks, memory storage devices and cameras.


The warrant also gave agents the right to take address books, diaries, notebooks and records regarding Internet accounts.

Steven Gamvroulas, an agent in the Utah Attorney General’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, said he’d received about 700 pieces of child pornography by e-mail from Hill.

As an undercover agent, Gamvroulas joined a network that shared such images, and said he was just one of many receiving the e-mails. Hill was not suspected of producing the pornography, Gamvroulas said.

The search warrant was executed Monday around 7 p.m. Hill was at home with his wife, Rebecca, and their daughters, ages 5 and 3. Rebecca and the children were escorted out of the home by Hilltown police when the FBI arrived.

The details of what happened next are unclear. Hill was shot five times by federal agents in his bedroom. A sixth shot, to his mouth, was ruled self-inflicted.

“Obviously, (Hill) acquired a weapon,” said Campbell.

The Hill family does not believe Darius killed himself, said Mitsch.

“The only individuals who know what happened in that room are Mr. Hill, who is deceased, and the FBI agents,” he said.

Hill was a sergeant in the Marines stationed in Camp Lejeune, N.C., when he was arrested Oct. 16, 1997, on accusations he conspired to steal and sell military equipment, according to court records.

In June 1998, Hill pleaded guilty during a court-martial hearing. He was sentenced to four years’ confinement, dishonorable discharge, reduction in rank and forfeiture of pay, records state.

Hill petitioned to have the conviction thrown out in 2001, saying his attorney pressured him to plead guilty, even though he insisted he was innocent. Federal prosecutors said the claims were without merit and a U.S. magistrate rejected the suit in December 2002.

Asked if the family had any fear now about not getting to the truth of how Hill died, Mitsch said, “We’ve got to in many ways trust law enforcement to do the right thing. There is some concern.”

The FBI initially said the coroner’s report showed Hill shot himself to death. But on Wednesday, the agency said its information was premature.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Death and dishonor

By SARAH LARSON and RILEY YATES
The Intelligencer

He was a handsome man with bright eyes and an easy smile.

He graduated from Pennridge High and followed his father’s footsteps into the Marines. Friends liked him. His family loved him.

But authorities say there was another side to Darius Hill, who died in his own bedroom last week after being shot six times.

Though he maintained his innocence in at least one case, Hill had been twice convicted of theft in military courts for stealing Marine property. He spent nearly two years in prison at Camp Lejeune and was dishonorably discharged from the Marines.

And when FBI agents showed up on the doorstep of his Callowhill Road home last Monday, they say they were looking for evidence of child pornography.

Investigations — into which of the six shots killed him and whether one was self-inflicted — are ongoing. His family has hired its own attorney to investigate his death.

Many people who knew Hill were shocked by his violent death. They question how a man they described as a “gentle giant” could have died in a barrage of bullets.

“I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I believe that 9/11 happened and that a man did land on the moon,” said James Celotto of Jamison, a friend who employed Hill as a contractor. “But there’s something fishy about this.”

“How did he shoot himself if he was shot five times?” Celotto asked. “Or why did they shoot him five times after he shot himself?”

Some others say they were not surprised by Hill’s death.

“I haven’t a clue as to why the FBI wanted him, (except) to say that it does not surprise me,” wrote Robert Ferris, a retired Marine officer and lawyer who worked on one of his court-martial cases.

Describing Hill as a “hell-of-a-likable guy,” Ferris nonetheless said his former client “certainly had a penchant for larceny.”

“Since the day I first met Darius, I have always believed he would die hard,” Ferris wrote. “Why he chose to fight, I have no earthly idea. I would suspect he chose to die fighting as opposed to going to back to prison for what may have well been the rest of his natural life.”

The boy becomes a man

The start of Hill’s military career and his later public accounts of his military life gave no hint to how his time in the Marines ended, with two courts-martial and a dishonorable discharge.

Hill spent his life in Hilltown and worked his way through the Pennridge school system.

Kirsten Godshall, of Harleysville, remembers Hill from their years at M.M. Seylar Elementary School, on the same street where Hill grew up and later died.

Hill was tall, with brownish-blond hair and was “really goofy,” Godshall remembered.

“He was just a funny guy, a big, funny guy,” Godshall said.

Hill graduated from Pennridge High School in 1986 and, not unlike other young men from that school, enlisted directly into the military.

He had always been an avid reader, his mother, Elaine, said, and favored military history most of all.

Like his father, he chose and was accepted into the U.S. Marines Corps, which prides itself on being the country’s elite fighting force, attracting only the best.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and sparked the Persian Gulf war, Hill and his fellow Marines soon were packing their bags for the desert.

By then a sergeant in the 3rd Tank Battalion, Hill and his comrades were charged with surging through mine fields to clear the way for the infantry.

Ten years later, in a story in The Intelligencer, Hill would say: “I remember vividly the first time I saw people killed, how it was different from what you see in the movies.”

He credited his survival and the survival of every member of his battalion to God.

“I can say this with absolute certainty that it was only by God’s graces,” he said then. “Everything they fired missed us.”

He returned home in 1991 to a hero’s welcome.

But a few years later, his military career hung by a thread.

A dishonorable discharge

In 1997, Hill was found guilty in a court-martial of stealing a military tractor.

It would be the first of two courts-martial he would face.

From April 1996 to October 1997, military officials say, Hill and three other Marines stole military property, including ammunition, .50-caliber machine-gun barrels, a bomb suit and cold weather boots. They sold the gear for profit, Marine prosecutors said.

Hill used the money from the illicit sales to pay his attorney’s fees from the tractor theft court-martial, according to court records.

The property thefts were part of a wider ring of more serious thefts, revealed after a yearlong undercover investigation by the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

While Hill was accused of stealing boots and ammo, other Marines were stealing C-4 explosives, hand grenades, land mines, machine guns and more. The Marines and several civilians sold the munitions at gun shows and out of homes and storage facilities in five states, according to court papers. In response, William S. Cohen, then secretary of defense, ordered a comprehensive review of how the military keeps track of and secures arms and ammunition.


On June 18, 1998, Hill pleaded guilty to charges of larceny, wrongful disposition of military property and conspiracy.

He was stripped of his rank and reduced to that of private, the lowest enlisted rank and was ordered to forfeit his pay. He was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps and sentenced to four years in prison.

For a man who was the son of a Marine, it must have been a low moment.

Maybe that’s why even people like Celotto, who worked with Hill regularly, knew nothing about his two convictions and his time in prison.

Celotto was friends with Hill for at least five years. Hill always spoke of his time in the Marines with pride and had never mentioned getting into trouble, Celotto said.

And when The Intelligencer ran a story on Hill in 2001, he recounted his exploits in Iraq, but never mentioned his convictions, prison time or dishonorable discharge.

A failed attempt to clear his name

In October 1999, Darius Hill was paroled from the brig at Camp Lejeune, in Jacksonville, N.C. He filed a legal motion to challenge his conviction. He argued in papers filed in U.S. District Court in 2001 that he was innocent and had been pressured by his attorney, Bruce Cockshoot, into pleading guilty to something that he did not do.

“Perhaps a truly innocent man cannot be coerced, but he can be deceived, and that is what Cockshoot did to me,” Hill wrote.

In the filings, Hill wrote that he had bought some of the items he was accused of stealing and had never seen the others, and that his guilty plea was made under duress.

“The insanity of the whole process so far, the months of legal lunacy were too much, and I broke down and cried,” he wrote of his June 1998 trial.

Federal prosecutors said his claims were without merit. In December 2002, U.S. Magistrate Judge William Webb rejected the suit, a decision upheld in U.S. District Court.

Ferris, the retired Marine who worked as a paralegal for one of Hill’s attorneys, said Hill was a “normal” guy who had apparently made a mistake.

“He served his time, and he left, and he went back up to Pennsylvania,” said Ferris, reached by phone in Jacksonville, N.C.

A violent end

After being released from prison, Hill continued to live in Jacksonville. He told The Intelligencer in 2001 that he ran a small construction company, RMT Construction, dedicated to fixing other contractors’ mistakes.

He met his second wife, Rebecca, in North Carolina and they moved together back to Hill’s childhood home on Callowhill Road in Hilltown. It was the house in which Hill had spent most of his life.

“The house he died in is the house we brought him home to as a baby,” mother Eileen Hill said last week.

With his skills and background, he found a job doing contracting work for Celotto.

Hill was family-oriented, Celotto said. He would talk to his wife several times a day and would leave work to pick his kids up from Catholic school.

Hill and Celotto were involved in a car wreck together in August 2003, after another car ran a red light in Warminster. In 2005, they filed a lawsuit against the driver, seeking compensation for their injuries.

Hill was a passenger in the car and was on the side that was hit, Celotto said. He suffered neck pain that required significant therapy.

“He wasn’t the kind of guy who would complain,” Celotto said. “He was a mountain of a man. He was as strong as an ox.”

Hill had a son and a daughter from his first marriage, and he and Rebecca had two daughters, ages 3 and 5.

The young girls were home when the doorbell rang around 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 28. Rebecca opened the door to find police and FBI agents on her doorstep, Hill’s mother recounted.

Rebecca and the girls were soon ushered out of the house and taken to the Hilltown police station. Only hours later did she learn that her husband was dead.

What exactly happened in that house is still unclear. The only witnesses were Hill, who is now dead, and the FBI agents.

Hill was an avid hunter, and his mother said he kept at least one gun in the house.

An FBI review team and the Bucks County detectives both are examining the shooting.

As for the charges of child pornography, it is unclear what will happen now. With Hill dead, no legal case against him can proceed, the family’s attorney, Greg Mitsch said.

Some of Hill’s friends have their doubts.

Celotto, who vacationed with Hill in Florida, said the man never displayed behaviors to suggest he was into child pornography.

“I’ve spent weeks at a time with him, just him and I,” Celotto said. “I never got a glimpse of that.”

“Everybody has demons, but I never saw it,” he added. “He was just a normal guy.”

Staff writer Jacob Fenton contributed to this report.

Ellie