A 34-year-old United States Postal Service employee has been charged with the murder of a missing man.
Jeremy Christian Pittman is currently being held in the Duval County Jail charged in connection to the death of 20-year-old Robert Glenn Hucks.
Newly appointed Chief of Investigations Adam Brown with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office announced the development in the case during a news conference on Friday morning.
http://liarcatchers.com/wrongful_death.html
Pittman is expected to make his first court appearance related to this case at 1 p.m. Friday.
According to police reports, Hucks was last seen leaving Club Metro, a well-known gay bar in the Riverside neighborhood, on the night of January 17.
His mother first reported him missing to J.S.O. on January 18 after not being able to get a hold of him.
Reports show she was worried about her son being depressed.
Brown said the case was assigned to the missing persons unit, which launched an investigation.
Officers completed a welfare check of Hucks’ apartment on College St. and found no signs of foul play.
He said information eventually revealed Hucks had left Metro with Pittman, and that the two went to Pittman’s apartment where an argument ensued.
Brown did not say what sparked the dispute, but that Pittman murdered the young man and dumped the body in a wooded area of Camden County, Georgia near the Florida state line.
Pittman was arrested and booked into jail overnight Friday after a group of hunters found Hucks’ body Thursday.
At no point did J.S.O. try and ask for the public’s help in finding Hucks by issuing a missing person’s alert. Brown said it might have jeopardized the investigation.
When First Coast News asked him if an alert might have made a difference, he said, “…each case is different. You could, hypothetically, you could let somebody know that you’re looking for, that we’re actually going in his direction. You don’t want a cookie cutter response to every missing person’s report.”
Reports show J.S.O. received information on January 24 that indicated Hucks might have been deceased near railroad tracks already by Metro.
Reports also show officers checked the area and did not turn up anything.
But it wasn’t until January 29 that reports show homicide detectives became involved in the case.
Brown believes Hucks was killed the night he went missing. He said it is not being investigated as a hate crime.
Before the discovery of the man’s body, a missing person’s flyer circulated on social media. Many people have also written their condolences online.
Police reports show Pittman lived in Jacksonville, but worked for the U.S.P.S. in St. Marys, Georgia.
