Shooting victim was Iraq war veteran
QUINCY, Mass. --An Army veteran who survived two years in Iraq and was working toward a degree in engineering has been identified as one of the latest victims of violent crime in Boston.
Former Army 1st Sgt. James Jacobs, 27, was shot multiple times outside a friend's home in the city's Dorchester neighborhood last Friday night, police said. He was taken to Boston Medical Center where he was pronounced dead, the city's 15th homicide victim of the year.
Carolyn Jacobs told the Patriot Ledger of Quincy that her son went to Dorchester on Friday to visit a friend. When he went back to his vehicle, he found that two tires had been slashed.
He was waiting for a tow truck when he was shot, she said.
"For him to come back and for someone to blow him away like that, I can't understand it," she said. "I'm going through hell right now."
Jacobs was so riddled with bullets that authorities refused to let his mother see the body.
"He was brutally murdered, shot 18 times in his back," Carolyn Jacobs said. "I'm just looking for answers, that the police come up with someone and the violence would stop. I never thought it would happen to me."
Jacobs grew up in Dorchester and graduated from Marblehead High School in 1998. He had moved into his mother's Randolph home when he got out of the Army in 2004.
Jacobs spent nearly five years in the Army and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after seeing children die in the streets of Iraq, his mother said.
He worked as a mortgage consultant for a Mattapan lending company while attending Wentworth Institute of Technology, where he was eight months away from a degree in electrical engineering, his mother said.
"He was a sweet, loving, young man, raised in a Christian home. You couldn't help loving him," his mother said.
There have been no arrests in Jacobs' slaying.
There has been a wave of violence in the city this year, including the shooting last month of Chiara Levin, 22, a Kentucky native and New York City resident visiting the city for an elderly aunt's birthday. Authorities think she was caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting.
There have been 16 homicides in Boston this year, compared with 10 at the same point last year.
The Guardian Angels have started patrolling Dorchester's streets and Gov. Deval Patrick has promised extra funds so the city can hire more police and provide summer jobs for youth.
A funeral service for Jacobs is scheduled for Tuesday at the Greater Love Tabernacle in Boston.
