Photo: Courtesy of The Gill Family

Quentin Gill's family acknowledges his criminal record but say that doesn't define his entire life -- and shouldn't keep police from solving his death

Four months after Quentin Gill failed to call his mother, his family says the man who masterminded Gill's killing has made them prisoners in the home where his sister, Princess Gill, raises her two young daughters.

When his mother, Paulette Gill, tried to report Quentin missing on April 23, she says District 3 police briefly arrested her for missing a court date. They released her but refused to file a missing persons report. She says they told her Gill was a grown man who could come and go as he pleased, that he had probably fled open warrants and that maybe he'd committed a robbery.

In response to the fliers with which Paulette had blanketed Quentin's stomping grounds, she soon got a tip that his body was somewhere on McHenry Avenue. Police didn't look into it, family and friends say, so it wasn't until May 9 that officers located Quentin Gill's body by its odor.

It was decomposing in a vacant apartment on McHenry Avenue. No one has been charged in his death.

'I did it and I'm still here'
Quentin Gill was no angel. His long rap sheet included robbery and felony drug possession.

"I never led anyone to believe that Quentin was a good kid, because he was something else, too," his mother says. "Quentin brought a lot of this that happened on himself. But it's like my son wasn't even a human being because he can't get no justice."

Paulette and Princess describe Quentin, 20, as a family man who loved his nieces, attended to Princess during childbirth and called his mother every day.

Paulette has a good idea who killed her son, and she'll tell you if you ask -- and probably even if you don't. She'll show you cell phone records and trace connections that are long and often related by blood.

Paulette will also tell you that a few years ago she sold crack herself, off and on for about a year. It was hard raising four children by herself with little income, she says. She's been on disability since trying to kill herself about five years ago.

Now she takes medicine to hold herself together for her surviving children and obsesses about her son's death. She says she calls the Cincinnati Police Homicide Department nearly every morning.

Homicide Det. Brian Trotta says the Gill investigation continues and that there are a series of suspects. He won't discuss the case, protecting information that would be known only by those involved.

But family and neighbors say that painful rumors float through the community -- Quentin's killers tricked him, snuck up behind him, beat him badly, tried to drown him in the river, tortured him for days, cut off his fingers and maybe other things, violated him with a broomstick, slit his throat and finally shot him. Then they paraded people past the body as a warning, leading to the tip about the body's location on McHenry.

Paulette has filed a complaint against police with the Civilian Complaint Authority for failing to follow up on that tip.

She hasn't returned to her home, which sits on a secluded dead-end street, since Quentin died. In daylight she and others have seen the man they suspect of masterminding the killing parked outside her house. She says he once even told her point blank, "Yeah, bitch, I did it and I'm still here, so what you gonna do?"

She does the best she can. Paulette and her two youngest children, Jasmine, 14, and Tyrell, 11, drift between relatives' houses.

Tyrell has taken his brother's death especially hard. He stole $500 from Princess and exchanged it for a cheap shotgun. Luckily, police caught him test-firing it, so now he's in counseling and on medication. But he's still nearly uncontrollable, so Paulette plans to home school him this year.

Paulette is also trying to get Jasmine transferred to a different school so she doesn't have to hear about her brother's death all the time.

Trying to get out
Unlike her mother and brothers, Princess, 23, has no criminal record. She works as a pharmacy technician for Kroger and just sent out a college application to earn state certification.

But in spite of an unrepaired bullet hole in her wall from Dec. 21 and another drive-by shooting Aug. 16, Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) has refused Princess an emergency transfer out of Millvale, the public housing development in South Cumminsville where she grew up. The neighbors she's known most of her life don't talk to her anymore, she says.

She first applied for an emergency transfer late last year after a bullet smashed her front window and lodged in the wall of the living room where she sat with her daughters.

"I was told a neighborly dispute is not reason for a transfer," Princess says. "(Millvale manager Adrian) Early said from his understanding they were shooting at my brother."

After Quentin died and those widely believed to be responsible started harassing his surviving family, Princess again applied for an emergency transfer. This time Early told her that her brother's death had nothing to do with her, she says.

Princess must first provide documentation to substantiate need for an emergency transfer, according to CMHA spokesperson Kelly Kramer.

"She's been asked several times, but she's not turned anything in," Kramer says.

Princess says that another CMHA employee told her he had the Dec. 21 police report but she'd have to supply her own copy.

"So I should have to take off work, go downtown and pay for a police report that you already have?" she says she asked.

Instead she paid about $100 to replace the broken window. She says Early told her she can still get reimbursed for the cost.

The second shooting left no holes or shattered windows as evidence, which is both good and bad, because this time Princess says there's not even a police account of the shots to turn over to CMHA.

Princess has also applied for the incentive transfer granted to longtime residents exhibiting good behavior. Kramer says CMHA will decide about that transfer by the end of August.

"People know about (the killing), they know who did it and everybody's afraid," says a friend of the family who asked not to be named. "Let's say if I do break the law, do that mean I should be murdered, do that mean I should be tortured and, if so, do that mean the person who do it to me should get away scot-free because maybe the police don't like me? Does someone else have to be murdered? One of the kids? What has to happen for this guy to be put away, get him off the streets?"

A Millvale resident also spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Where my anger comes in is the fact that so many of these kids are being killed and the police are being nonchalant because of these kids' past," she says. "That has nothing to do with it. Justice does not happen fast enough when you have no money. If his parents had lots of money, this case would already be solved and wrapped up, but that's not the case because we're considered poor people because we live in government housing. It's really bothering a lot of people that there's no justice."

She says the Gills aren't alone in feeling like prisoners in their house and says she doesn't even open her blinds anymore.

'Bullets don't have eyes'
Paulette says an angry Det. Trotta called her a few days after CityBeat spoke to him. Give police time, he told her. She thinks four months was time enough and that they're not following up on numerous leads.

Police tell concerned residents that the rumors about Gill are unsubstantiated hearsay. Meanwhile, residents watch on TV as police dig in vain under a remote barn for the remains of a white woman missing for eight years and see that Carrie Culberson's boyfriend is convicted and jailed without evidence of her body.

Paulette says one possible informant stopped trying to talk because police asked him more questions about Quentin's robberies than his death.

On Aug. 22, Trotta reportedly called a contact number given to him by Quentin's girlfriend, Lakesha Stevens, who also stays with relatives since his death. Apparently thinking he was speaking to Stevens' mother, he asked why she'd let her daughter date a thug like Quentin. In fact, he'd called the mother of Stevens' friend, and Stevens and Paulette have new reason to be upset.

"He did as much as everybody else, but he was a good person," Stevens says. "They keep going into his background, that's all he care about."

"You don't even know who you're talking about and you talking about him like he's nobody," Paulette says. "No wonder ain't nobody giving him no answers."

Roscoe Stone, Princess' father, considered himself Quentin's father as well.

"I almost lost it because a police officer said out of her mouth, 'Well, he had a criminal record,' " Stone says. "But that don't mean nothing. He was murdered."

He looks at his 6-month-old granddaughter Khial and shakes his head.

"Look, man," he says. "I can't see it. Bullets don't have eyes."

Four-year-old Kelah kisses her baby sister, tries to play pattycake, lets Khial tug on her beaded braids. Kelah won't even go into the bathroom by herself anymore, Princess says.

"I was shakin'," Kelah says.

"What was they doin' to make you shake?" Paulette asks.

"Shooting," she says, her gaze becoming distant and her small body going still. ©