PAGELAND, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — A grieving Pageland family is still pressing for answers in the death of a 13-year-old.
It’s been one year since the Duncan family lost their son Jacob during a drive-by shooting and officials still have no leads in the case.
“Jacob would meet me outside at my car every day that I got home. It’s like he would be standing in the window waiting every time, whether I was at a store or went to work any time,” said his mother Nicole Duncan.
Until one day… that stopped.
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“January 26, 2024,” she said. And she’ll never forget it.
“I left for work at 6:30 p.m. that night. I got 20 minutes down the road, and I got a phone call from my daughter saying that Jacob had been shot,” Duncan said.
Her 13-year-old was shot in the head while standing outside of his home with other family members. Investigators say Jacob Duncan wasn’t the intended target of the bullet.
“It’s been hard. My daughter was standing in front of him when it happened. She’s very traumatized,” Duncan said between tears.
After a year of investigating, the family still has no answers to help them find peace. Duncan says her son’s case is now cold.
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“They promised us that someone would be held accountable. But now they say they have no information, not enough to arrest anyone,” Duncan said.
So the family decided to work towards justice themselves. They’re offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to an arrest in Jacob’s homicide investigation. Posters are plastered across the city in hopes of triggering someone’s memory… or heart.
“I never thought I would be doing this. It was it was hard. We had all of our family members come and help us laminate them and then post them up. We had about eight people helping us because there were 100 of them. We had some people come out as we were posting them as missing. So we feel like a lot of people in town don’t even know what happened.”
She says a woman saw the flyers and donated banners, more signs, and money to the cause.
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“Jacob deserves justice. And whoever did that to our family member can do it again to someone else. I’m confident that god has a plan and he knows what he’s doing. That’s the only thing that’s keeping me levelheaded and strong for my children,” she said.
Her daughters, Laura Vazquez and Mireya Flores, were close with their brother. Mireya was standing next to him when he died. They say a year later, the grief hasn’t gotten better but they feel their little brother with them all the time.
“Green is for Jacob.. Green and red were his favorite colors. But we chose green for the shirts… He used to say all black goes hard,” Flores and Vazquez say.
The family held a balloon release on Sunday to memorialize the tragic day. Each family member and friend wrote a message for Jacob.
“D3 world, never forgotten …the day he passed away. You know, like it’s all love. He’s still with us. We’re still with him,” Flores said.