A state prison inmate serving time for the 2006 rape of a Jonesboro woman and the attempted capital murder of a police officer hanged himself with a sheet attached to an air vent at the Varner SuperMax Unit.
The body of Steven Earl Hill Jr., 24, was found at 2:50 a.m. Monday by security staff members who were delivering breakfast, said Shea Wilson, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Correction.
Staff members start serving breakfast in the early morning because it takes a long time to deliver meals to 1,600 inmates, Wilson said.
Hill, who had been held in a one-man cell, was serving a 621/2-year sentence. He entered the prison system in 2007 at age 17.
Hill was a foster-care runaway from Blytheville when he was accused at age 16 of raping a woman in Jonesboro.
The woman, 20, told police that a man knocked on her Sun Avenue apartment door Nov. 21, 2006, and asked to use the telephone. He then pointed a gun at her and went inside her apartment.
"He told me to get on the floor and he raped me," she wrote in a statement filed in circuit court. "He told me if I didn't stay [down] he would [shoot] me."
After the woman identified Hill in a photograph, police obtained an arrest warrant and went to an apartment belonging to Hill's sister. When the five officers arrived, Hill hid in the attic.
Patrol officer Christopher Walker, then 36, climbed into the attic, and Hill shot him. A 9 mm round struck Walker in the chest, but his protective vest kept the bullet from causing serious injury.
Walker shot Hill twice in the torso with his .40-caliber handgun.
Upon Hill's release from the Arkansas Children's Hospital, he was formally charged as an adult in the shooting.
He pleaded guilty the next year to attempted capital murder and rape and received 30 years for each conviction. The sentences were ordered to be served consecutively.
Hill entered the prison system six months after turning 17.
Before the rape and shooting, he had been in foster care since April 1998, when his father and stepmother were convicted in the starvation death of his 4-year-old sister.
After the child, Krystal Hill, was found dead in a bedroom, a medical examiner determined that she died of kidney failure and neglect, exacerbated by physical abuse. More than 100 scars covered her body.
According to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette archives, Steven Hill Sr. was convicted of second-degree murder on Aug. 21, 1997, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. The girl's stepmother, Ida Mae Hill, was convicted in a separate trial of manslaughter on April 7, 1998, and sentenced to 81/2 years in prison.
The younger Steven Hill would have been eligible for parole in 2043. Aside from his 60-year sentence, he also had a 10-year concurrent sentence for second-degree sexual assault out of Mississippi County and a 21/2-year consecutive sentence for second-degree battery out of Lincoln County.
State Desk on 08/19/2014