Anna Miller has lived with a helpless feeling for more than six years and continues to agonize over the same question: Who killed her son?
"I just can't understand how somebody could carry this around in their heart all this time without saying something. I mean, it's got to be eating away at them. They've got to be like deteriorating on the inside," she told News 5.
Miller is now offering $3,000 for information that leads to Je'Rome Tucker's killer. Summit County Crimestoppers will also pay up to $2,000 to anyone who can solve the cold case.
On the night of December 29, 2010, Tucker was ambushed moments after he got out of a car in front of the Akron house he was renting on Aberdeen Street. He was shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the back.
Tucker, who was the father of six girls, got back into the car, but crashed and died.
Miller said her son had gone back to the house to allow his girlfriend inside and she witnessed the killing. She gave police a limited description of the gunman: a tall, dark man wearing a hat and sunglasses.
Miller was told by detectives that a possible suspect was questioned in the Summit County Jail a few months after the murder and he made a peculiar statement.
"The police asked him, did he murder my son? And he told them, 'That's between me and God.' He didn't say no. He didn't say yes. He just said, 'That's between me and God.'"
Police said Tucker did have a criminal history so he may have been targeted and could have had enemies.
Akron Police Lt. Rick Edwards said the department does not have any new leads in the six-year-old murder.
Miller hopes the reward money will motivate someone to come forward. She wants justice for her son's daughters. One of them never met her dad, born four months after he was killed.
Asked what she would say to the killer, Miller responded, "I'm sure your mother would want to know if something happened to you like this. I just want to know."
Anyone with information on the case should call Summit County Crimestoppers at 330-434-COPS. Tipsters can remain anonymous.
