By NC WANTED Staff

Posted: Feb 3, 2009
Updated: Dec. 28, 2009

CUMBERLAND COUNTY — Elaine Minshew and Robbie Jacobs went out to eat every Sunday. Robbie graduated high school in June 1995 and by June of 1997, was living with his father on Lawndale Street, just outside of Fayetteville, working first shift at the factory where his father was a supervisor. But Elaine missed her son, and the two decided they would get together once a week. They took turns paying.

“Robbie was a good boy,” Minshew said. “He was my hero.”

Jacobs’s father found his 20-year-old son on July 18, 1997, slumped over on the couch. At first he thought Jacobs was asleep but within hours he would learn his son had been shot three times in the back of the head.

Jacobs sold marijuana. He started a few months before he was killed, to pay his parents back for lawyers’ fees they had loaned him after a drunken driving ticket he got when he was 19.

“You know, when your kids grow up, they have a life of their own,” Minshew said. “You can’t re-tell them what to do and of course I didn’t know. I’d be the last person he’d ever wanted to have known.”

Staff Sgt. Bobby Reyes of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office still talks with the family on a regular basis – Minshew, or one of Robbie’s two sisters, Danielle or Lisa. He takes a stern stance toward drug dealing and admits he often sees homicide victims who were involved with drugs one way or the other. But in the same breath, he is quick to say that Robbie Jacobs was a good kid who made a bad decision, and predicts that, were Jacobs alive today, he would be “a model citizen.”

It was likely someone came over to Jacobs’ house on the pretext of buying marijuana, which was the only thing investigators could ever confirm was stolen from the house. It seems certain Robbie trusted whoever sat on the couch beside him – Robbie was an athlete, and his sisters said he didn’t start fights, but would never have shied away from one if he felt physically threatened.

There have been suspects, and Sgt. Reyes has a thick file full of interviews and notes. It’s tough to investigate cases where drugs were involved, though – fewer people come forward for fear of implicating themselves as drug users or dealers, and people involved in drugs generally do not have a good relationship with police.

Meanwhile, the pain remains as intense for the Jacobs family as the day they found out Jacobs was murdered. His father died a few years ago, and Lisa blames the heavy drinking that started shortly after Jacobs’ death.

Family and investigators hope time – and the behaviors and relationships that have changed since 1997 – leads someone with information to do the right thing. If not for their conscience’s sake, maybe for the $5,000 reward they would stand to gain.

“And I know, dear God, if he knew what was going to happen he would have never done it,” Minshew said of her son’s marijuana dealing. “I’m disappointed that he did what he did, but, he was a good kid. I don’t care what he did. He was a good kid. Everybody messes up. And that’s maybe how he messed up but it cost him his life.”

If you have any information about the unsolved case of Robbie Jacobs, call NC WANTED toll free at 1.866.43.WANTED (1.866.439.2683) or click on "Report a Tip" Your identity can be kept confidential.