NEW ORLEANS — The suspect taken into custody after a double shooting that wounded a deputy constable and a property manager last week has still not been booked with any crimes related to the violent confrontation, but he has been booked with a 2021 armed robbery in which police say his mother was the victim.
Jason Tillman, 23, was re-booked in the Sept. 1 robbery of his mother in which detectives say he pulled up to her while she was waiting in a gas line, pointed a gun at her, then reached inside her car and stole her purse, according to the arrest warrant affidavit.
“Wanted subject…held his mother at gunpoint while he grabbed her purse out of her vehicle,” the affidavit states.
Tillman called his mother several times that day about getting money from her, the affidavit states. When she told him she would deal with him after she got gas, he found her at the gas station, started an argument, then pulled a gun, detectives wrote.
“Mr. Tillman stated that he was going to shoot your f---ing car up and shoot you,” the affidavit states. “The victim was standing outside of her vehicle pumping gas on the passenger side rear. Mr. Tillman opened the driver's side door…and grabbed her purse.”
At the time of that alleged robbery, Tillman was already on probation for a previous armed robbery and felon with a gun charge that was the subject of a plea deal earlier last year. While the warrant on the new robbery case involving his mother was never served, Tillman is now facing those new charges and a probation violation in the earlier robbery case, court records show.
Tillman remains locked up following the massive manhunt and SWAT roll Wednesday that started following the shooting in New Orleans East and ended with Tillman’s arrest after he barricaded himself in a house in Mid-City. In the tense and chaotic scene that followed, two schools were closed and Canal Street partially closed as local, state and federal officers used K-9 dogs, drones and a helicopter set up a multi-block perimeter around a house in the 3200 block of Iberville where Tillman was found hiding.
No charges have been lodged in that shooting as detectives with the NOPD’s Force Investigation Team sort through the evidence to piece together exactly what happened as Deputy Constable Warren Smith, 53, was trying to serve an eviction notice Wednesday morning alongside an unnamed property manager, 36.
Police said Smith was shot in the shoulder and the property manager was shot in the torso, but they have not said who had guns, who fired shots, and, most importantly, who fired the first shot.
Court records show that one of Tillman’s prior felonies was a 2017 burglary conviction in which he also received probation after receiving a four-year suspended sentence. That probation was revoked in connection with the subsequent armed robbery arrest, re-establishing the four-year prison sentence.
The date on the probation revocation is Feb. 11, 2021, but the court records do not show how Tillman was back on the street within a year and a half.
