Trotwood police want anyone with information about the Destiny Mills homicide to call CrimeStoppers at 222-STOP. Callers can remain anonymous if they wish.
Linda Walker never met her daughter’s boyfriend until he sent her a middle-of-the-night message on social media.
“He messaged me on Facebook to tell me my daughter was shot,” said Walker of Huber Heights.
That boyfriend, Michael D. Scott, is the same man charged in the Sept. 27 killing of 19-year-old Joshua Hamilton of Springfield inside Kricket’s Tavern in Huber Heights.
Scott was also present at the March 24 shooting in an apartment on Biddison Avenue in Trotwood that resulted in the death of 20-year-old Destiny Mills, Walker’s daughter.
Trotwood police say Scott told them he was in the apartment along with a number of other people when a hail of eight to 10 bullets came through the walls and front door. Scott is not a suspect, according to police, but may have been a target.
“We do have other suspects that we’re looking at,” Trotwood Police Capt. John Porter said. “There were also a couple of different incidents that we believe put into this whole chain of events that prompted this shooting.”
Witnesses said one of the rounds struck Mills in the chest while she was lying on the couch. She died while being transported to Good Samaritan Hospital.
Porter said detectives know that there were many people in and out of the apartment that day, which complicates the investigation. They are still in the process of interviewing witnesses and looking at phone records.
“We ask that the family be patient. We ask that if they have good information, they bring it straight forward to us as they have done in the past,” Porter said.
The shooting was just the beginning of a family’s nightmare and a tangled cast of characters police are trying to investigate in this unsolved murder.
One of those people is Scott.
“She had mentioned the boyfriend maybe a couple of times in that last couple weeks but didn’t say much about him,” Walker said. “She always brought her boyfriends home for me to meet. She never brought him for some reason.”
In the weeks after the shooting, Walker became suspicious of Scott, particularly when she couldn’t contact him. “He blocked me on Facebook early on,” she said.
Weeks later, Walker said she was told that her daughter had two black eyes and admitted to her boss that she was afraid of her boyfriend.
Then, in September, she was shocked to learn that Scott was indicted in the Kricket’s shooting. Although police are treating the two homicides as unrelated events, it only added to the suspicions Mills’ family already had about the 20-year-old Scott, who is being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $1 million bond.
Linda Walker says she won’t stop until she gets justice for her daughter, who had plans to finish college at Wright State University and was living on her own for the first time. Growing up, she was a soccer star, a cheerleader and in the gifted child program, her mom said.
She wanted to have a career in fashion design.
Walker admits she calls the detectives often and says they must cringe when they see a message from her. She also admits that she is doing some detective work of her own.
She wonders why Scott lied to her on the night of the shooting. “He told me it was just him and Destiny at their apartment, that was it. He said if he weren’t there they would have shot up an empty house.”
She learned later from police and news reports that there were possibly as many as 15 people in the apartment when gunfire erupted.
Rena Jordan, Mills’ grandmother, has a message for whoever killed Destiny.
“You have two things you need to do. You need to get yourself right with the law and you need to get yourself right with Jesus,” she said. “You have run out of time. It’s over.”
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