On Sundays, his family would go to church. That was where he built the strong faith he would need to get through the worst ordeal of his life.<\/p>\n
On a sunny day that May, his whole life changed. Hillary went to school as usual, but during his entrepreneurship class, his headmaster walked through the door and motioned for Hillary to leave with him. Always obedient, Hillary followed anxiously after his headmaster, wondering what instructions he would have to follow.<\/p>\n
Waiting around the corner for him was a police officer. As Hillary\u2019s classmates looked on, the officer held Hillary up against a wall and arrested him for the murder of a man who was found buried in Hillary\u2019s family\u2019s backyard. When he was put into the police vehicle, he saw his younger brother Joseph and his mother in the car, both also arrested for the same crime.<\/p>\n
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Though he was shocked that they were all being accused of a crime they didn\u2019t commit, \u201cI never reacted negatively,\u201d Hillary tells Guideposts.org of his arrest. \u201cWhen I was taken to the police captain, I expected to be released in three days,\u201d he says, remembering what he\u2019d always heard about the procedure for people who had been arrested by mistake.<\/p>\n
The night before his arrest, Hillary\u2019s youngest brother Herbert had run outside to meet Hillary in front of their home in a panic, explaining that a man had been murdered in their yard. The man was an employee of Hillary\u2019s father who had recently stolen Hillary\u2019s mother\u2019s chapattis and their savings from their home before going into hiding. A mob spotted the man in town and, despite Hillary\u2019s father\u2019s attempts to restrain them, the mob killed the man in front of Hillary\u2019s home and left him dead at about 8:30 a.m., when Hillary and his brothers had been at school.<\/p>\n
Feeling the police were too corrupt to be trusted not to accuse him of the murder, Hillary\u2019s father buried the man in the backyard himself. None of them ever dreamed that Hillary, his mother, father and little brother Joseph would all be arrested and accused of the crime.<\/p>\n
The three days Hillary thought it would take for him to be released came and went, uneventfully. Though Hillary\u2019s mother was released after two weeks in prison, Hillary and Joseph and their father stayed in the Hoima prison for two months before getting a court hearing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still had hope that I was going to be released,\u201d he says, until he learned in court that his case had to be heard by the high court and they would have to wait until the next time the high court met. \u201c\u2018When will the court sit?\u2019 I asked, and the magistrate told me he didn\u2019t know the time, the date, the hour and even the judge who was going to work upon our case. The only thing [to do] was go, relax and wait until that date. That\u2019s when I realized, \u2018Uh oh. It\u2019s going to take a long time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Hillary and Joseph were moved to Ihungu Remand Home, a juvenile prison in Masindi, to wait for the high court to meet, while their father remained in the Hoima prison.<\/p>\n
Every day in prison, Hillary says, \u201cI was praying and asking one thing: for God to help me out.\u201d In the meantime, he made sure to take care of his little brother as best as he could. Being the great student and obedient child that he was, Hillary soon became the katikiro (prime minister) of his fellow juvenile prisoners.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was the one taking care of them,\u201d he says. \u201cI would take them to the hospital if they got sick. I took them to the public hospital to only get help from one doctor. Unfortunately, this one doctor wasn\u2019t working appropriately.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hillary says the doctor would neglect them because they were juvenile prisoners. The doctor would make them wait very long periods of time and only treat one or two of them before leaving the office, or treating the doctor\u2019s close friends first, making the juveniles spend the whole day standing around waiting for the doctor to treat them. \u201cThe doctor wasn\u2019t having any empathy on the patients,\u201d Hillary says, and it upset him greatly.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told God, if I am released, I will become a doctor and I will make a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the months went on, however, it was looking less and less likely that Hillary and Joseph\u2019s case would be heard quickly. To make matters worse, in December 2009, one of the juvenile prisoners died of asthma, but Hillary was accused of that death as well, since he was the leader, all but ensuring he would either face the death penalty or spend the rest of his life in prison.<\/p>\n
His mother would come to visit him and Joseph whenever she could and she helped them stay strong as they waited for justice to be served.<\/p>\n