DeKalb County District Attorney Robert James announced Monday that the man arrested in the armed take over of a school may enter a plea Tuesday.
Michael Brandon Hill is to be in Superior Court Judge Mark Anthony Scott’s courtroom at 9 a.m. Tuesday. James did not specify in his statement what agreements if any the prosecution may have come to with Hill and his attorneys. Hill has a history of mental health issues, according to his family.
The case in August 2013 grabbed national attention after school employee Antoinette Tuff successfully talked the then 20-year-old Hill down while he held her prisoner in the school’s office and had discharged his weapon.
No one was hurt in the tense stand-off. Hill, who was described as quiet and unassuming by his neighbors, had more than 500 rounds of ammunition for the military-style assault rifle he carried.
Hill, along with five other residents, lived in a house a short walk from McNair Discovery Learning Center near Decatur in southwest DeKalb County. His brother had accused him in December 2012 of making terroristic threats via Facebook, according to Henry County police.
Among the charges Hill faces are aggravated assault on a police officer, terroristic threats, false imprisonment and obstruction of an officer.
According to the indictment, Hill “did threaten to commit murder, a crime of violence, with the purpose of causing the evacuation of a building occupied and utilized by McNair Discovery Learning Center.”
Tuff, a bookeeper who later wrote a book about the ordeal, was able to talk Hill into putting down the assault rifle and surrendering after about an hour, partly through empathizing with him.
Hill grew up amid violence and dysfunction, said one of his two older brothers, Tim Hill.
Their mother was twice convicted for burglary, in 2006 and 2009, and was serving five years’ probation when she died in 2010, according to court records in Henry County. Their father, Tim Hill said, had long been out of the picture.
Tim Hill said he realized that his brother —- whom he calls by his middle name —- had a dangerous side in June 2009, when Brandon got into an argument with a woman who was boarding in his family’s house.
“His revenge was to go up to the attic and set her stuff on fire, ” Tim Hill told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year. “When he was raging, he said he wished me and my older brother had died in the fire.”
The younger boy was 16 at the time.
Tim Hill said his brother spiraled out of control as a young teen. At first, he shoplifted from Dollar Stores and CVS drugstores, then began burglarizing churches. Authorities sent the boy to juvenile detention facilities several times, Tim Hill said, where he would take psychiatric medications that stabilized his moods. Upon release, he drifted off the medications, and on a few occasions attempted suicide by cutting his wrists.
“After he started the house on fire, ” Tim Hill said, “my stepdad asked the district attorney whether it was going to take him killing someone before they got him the help he needed.”
Michael Hill wound up at Youth Villages, a juvenile justice and psychiatric treatment facility in Douglas County.
It is unclear when Hill left Youth Villages but he lived in a group home for a time before showing up in his late teens at the Prophetical Word Church in Decatur, said Natasha Knotts, an assistant pastor, who took care of Hill for awhile as a teen. Hill shared virtually nothing about past troubles, Knotts said, but the Lithonia woman said she invited him to stay with her family, anyway.
“He wasn’t in contact with his family at all, ” Knotts said. “That’s the reason we took him in without questions —- he didn’t have anyone to look after him.”
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