Army vet found murdered in St Louis may have been targeted on Craigslist

Police say Army veteran Robert Polk was found dead in a St. Louis alley yesterday after being gunned down.

Family members of the 22-year-old man said he was going to look at a used car advertised on Craigslist before his disappearance, Fox News reports.

Workers for a demolition company said they discovered Polk’s body lying face down, hidden behind a piece of drywall in a north St. Louis garage.  They told police they saw “seven or eight shell casings” in a nearby street. “It looks like he had been dragged there because there was a blood trail,” one of the workers told KTVI.

Polk was last seen Oct. 3. According to the Post-Dispatch, relatives said Polk was going to look at a black Mustang he saw on Craigslist, where he’d often check out used cars that were for sale. Police say they’re monitoring Polk’s financial accounts and were “investigating a transaction made after his disappearance.”

Polk’s mother, Hayleen Jones, knew something was wrong when she didn’t hear from her son after he went to go look at the car. “He’s a mama’s child, he would have called me by now or his brother, anybody,” Jones said.

Polk was in the Army reserves and recently returned to St. Louis from Kentucky to look for work. He was living in his mother’s basement at the time of the murder, and had recently started a job at a plastics company to save for a car.

Investigators aren’t sure when Polk was killed. An autopsy is scheduled for Friday.

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