After two days of police digging on the Southside, the medical examiner removed human remains Thursday from the home of a man who has been in jail since May.
Several police officers and crime scene vans and command vehicles had been at the home on Bowden Circle East, off Belfort Road, since Wednesday.
Police said a tip led them to the property, which belongs to Russell Tillis, 54, who was most recently accused of attacking a police officer with knives. Tillis has been arrested several times over the past decade, including charges of sexual assault, stalking, indecent exposure and soliciting for prostitution.
He previously served 12 years in prison for convictions ranging from kidnapping to burglary to grand theft. One report from February 2015 said Tillis put nails in his neighbor’s driveway.
"It wasn't surprising that there's police over at that house because there's been police over there throughout the years," neighbor Justina David said. "Something seems to always be going on, so that wasn't surprising that it was at that house."
Other neighbors described the home as an “evil house.”
Patricia Lashley, a longtime neighbor of the man known to area residents as Rusty, said Tillis took over the house after his mother died in the last few years.
“When Rusty came back, his mother passed, the property was vacant as far as I know,” Lashley said. “Rusty took over the property about a year ago, and he built it like a fortress. It looked weird because he had a very high privacy fence, all types of shacks and buildings everywhere. It looked like an armed camp.”
News4Jax crime and safety analyst Gil Smith said it's hard to say how much police still have to investigate on the property. He said police will use technology that electronically penetrates the ground looking for evidence, and because of Tillis’ arrest record, detectives will likely research his past crimes to see if the remains could be linked to anything he did in the past.
“They’re going to pull his criminal record and look at the assaults he committed and look at the way he assaulted people,” Smith said. “And then when they get the remains here, they can check to see if those types of attacks are consistent with bruising or markings on the remains here that would connect him to the same types of assaults that he may have committed.”
Don Redman, who used to represent the neighborhood on the Jacksonville City Council, said residents reached out to him for help.
"The threats that I took, the threats that the neighbors took, I hope he didn't really hurt somebody bad," Redman said.
Police would only say that human remains were found at the property and that there is still an active investigation at the scene.
Lashley said that despite Tillis' criminal history, she was surprised remains were found at the home.
“We’re all speculating, but we cannot fathom who it could be, because he had a bad reputation,” Lashley said. “It was a quiet neighborhood except for that, and then when his mother passed, then it changed quite drastically for even worse.”