By Eden Garcia —
Jill Hilliard* was a state softball champion, straight-A student in high school from a home where they didn’t even have alcohol. But when she went to college, she was using drugs and hooked up with a drug dealer forging checks to score money for drugs.
“When I moved in with him, I realized that he was a full-blown drug dealer,” Jill says. “He was selling cocaine. He was selling ecstasy. He was doing all the things. And for a while, I was still going to college. And I started using harder drugs.”
She got pregnant through him and got jailed because of him. In prison, Jill got radically saved, delivered her baby and came out a transformed person.
Jill had an idyllic childhood in Akron, Ohio, but friends in school introduced her to alcohol and drugs, which led to her downfall. Even though her friends introduced her to substance abuse, they opposed her hooking up with her boyfriend. She didn’t know at the time that he was a drug dealer.
When Jill moved in with him, she found out.
They would sing, “Never get high on your own supply.”
But addiction drove them into consuming the stash. At different moments, they found themselves without cash and resorted to forging checks.
At the bank one day, Jill sensed the staff knew who she was and what she was doing.
“We get in a full-blown police chase,” she remembers. “They pulled us out of the car and stripped us down.”
She got locked up in County. Her crimes qualified for additional RICO charges.
She cried and cried and cried.
Her family was horrified.
“My whole life was crashing down before me because my family was didn’t teach me to do any of this,” Jill says. “I’m literally now on the front pages of newspapers.”
Jail staff wondered at her. She didn’t seem like the regular female inmate. Because she was crying, they warned her she would be put on anti-depressants. They recommended she distract herself with sports or other activities, even the jail Bible study.
Jill remembered back to her childhood when her grandmother talked about Jesus all the time.
She went to the Bible study.
“It was like Narnia, a whole other place,” she remembers. It seemed so other-worldly.
She accepted Jesus into her heart. The experience was dramatic.
“Everything on the inside changed,” she recalls. “It felt like everything in me before that day felt dead and everything after that day felt alive. I got radical about Jesus.”
She began reading her Bible. “Devouring” her Bible, might be a better word for it.
“Every time I read my Bible, I felt completely different,” she says. “I felt completely alive. I was a brand new person once I knew Jesus. He was making himself so real to me.”
There were trials in jail. The lesbians target her, leering at her in the shower and touching her when she fell asleep in her bed.
She told staff she needed to move out. Staff laughed. She should have thought of that when she committed her crimes, they said.
So Jill prayed.
Within eight days, she was moved to another facility. A doctor’s strange note about her lacking a uterus got her moved to another facility for observation.
She couldn’t have lacked a uterus. She was pregnant.
Jill delivered her baby in jail, got out and worked in restaurants and prison ministry. Today her son is in his 20s and in the military. She does prison ministry with Prisoners for Christ Ministries in Ohio.
*Spelling of the last name is unconfirmed. Related content: he declined a knife at Louisiana’s bloodiest prison, he saw Jesus in a vision in prison, app specifically for inmates saves 1M.
