James Hill noticed his son Jacob’s warm heart at a young age. At Jacob’s 9th or 10th birthday, his son was playing “soldiers” in the backyard when his younger sister, Breanna, asked to join in.
“He came in and kind of told us ‘Breanna wants to play and we’re gonna let her, but don’t worry, I’m gonna take care of her,’” James Hill said. “That was just how he was all the time.”
In early October, Jacob Hill, a 30-year-old Army staff sergeant, was one of nearly 200 Alabama National Guard soldiers sent to Washington, D.C., as part of a mobilization called up by President Donald Trump over the summer.
On Nov. 13, Hill died after suffering a medical emergency at the Virginia hotel his unit was staying at. National Guard task force officials in charge of the D.C. mission told Task & Purpose Monday that Hill’s death was a “non-duty-related incident.” It appears to be the first death of a National Guardsman ordered to Washington.
James Hill told Task & Purpose that his family has not yet received the medical examiner’s report to know what exactly happened to his son, who served as a military police soldier in the Guard.
His family confirmed to Task & Purpose that Hill and his wife, Autumn, had two young daughters — Oaklin, 9, and Ella, 10.
The Army hosted the family for a memorial service in Virginia last week. The family is planning for a funeral with military honors in Alabama in early December.
An athlete and a ‘genius’
Hill was remembered by his family as down-to-earth, selfless, and curious.
Hill’s mom, Sharay Gay, described her son as “super respectful,” “born with an old soul,” and “almost like Superman,” with the way he took care of his daughters and helped Gay take care of her two grandsons.
Hill grew up in Sylacauga and Alexander City, Alabama, which Hill’s younger sister Breanna Manley described as a small town “where everybody knows everybody.” Outside of the guard, Hill worked as an electronics technician at a local hospital and did a stint at the Sylacauga fire department.
Hill also went by the nickname “Bobby,” which he got while working at a Honda plant in Lincoln, Alabama. The factory gave out uniforms with random names and Hill got one that happened to be Bobby, which people connected to the character Bobby Hill from the cartoon, “King of the Hill,” so “it just kind of stuck,” Manley said.
Manley remembered growing up with her brother as a “quirky character” with “a hodgepodge” of varying interests.
“I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said ‘a genius,’” his stepmother Amy Hill said. “He was always willing to learn and constantly researching things just because he wanted to know it.”
Though Hill played football and wrestled in high school, he was also tech-savvy and often had a book in his hands — sometimes to his detriment.
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Manley remembered one afternoon after school as the two walked home from the bus. One of the new Harry Potter books had come out and Hill was fully immersed. Manley was walking a few steps ahead when, suddenly, she no longer heard her brother’s footsteps trailing behind.
“He had fallen into, like, a storm grate and one of his legs was sticking in and it was because he was reading Harry Potter. I tried to get him out and obviously I couldn’t because I was probably in 3rd grade,” Manley said. “I had to run home and get help.”
Hill’s grandfather was an Army veteran along with a long line of relatives in other services, Gay said, adding that he “always wanted to carry that” and talked about joining the military since he was a little boy.
Hill served 13 years in the Guard, joining “just a few days after his high school graduation,” and attended basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, James Hill said. Hill served as a squad leader with the 1166th Military Police Company during the D.C. mission. He had previously deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Kuwait, Botswana, and the US-Mexico border.
“He’s always had that sort of discipline about him,” Manley said. “You have to have some sort of dedication and resilience when it comes to sports and I think that kind of built it up for him and he wanted to serve his country — that was one of the big things about him and he loved doing it.”
Before being mobilized to D.C., Hill spent his last day at home with his family for their annual pumpkin patch visit in late September. Manley said Hill wasn’t able to tell the family a lot about his upcoming deployment, “but we knew that he wouldn’t be home for Thanksgiving.”
Before every deployment, Hill always did two things, his father said: He helped clean the gutters and made his father promise to make sure that his daughters were taken care of. James Hill said his son’s two young daughters were his “absolute world.”
“I think that just goes to show what kind of person he is and that he wasn’t worried about himself at all. He was just worried about the girls and what they would go through if he didn’t make it back,” Manley said. “After all the deployments out of the country and everything, you never think that the one in the states is the one that’s gonna destroy us.”
