Friend: Accused killer of grandmother fell into drugs

He called her “Nana,” the grandmother who stepped in to help him when other family members couldn’t or wouldn’t.

“She was the best person in the world,” said Kaley Kunkel, an exgirlfriend of Nathan Reid Billingsley from his days in League City. “Caring.” Kunkel said Tuesday that Billingsley became swallowed by depression, anger and drugs, culminating, prosecutors say, in a series of threatening texts directed at his grandmother.

Billingsley is now charged with murder in the death of his grandmother, Hazel Billingsley, 67, whose body was found Sunday wrapped in a blanket in a shed behind her home.

The 21-year-old Cypress man remained in the Harris County Jail Tuesday on $200,000 bail, and was on a suicide watch.

“It’s really sad that he did that to his grandma, because she was there for him,” said Kunkel, 20, who said they broke up about a year ago.

Nathan Billingsley is accused of shooting his grandmother twice on Saturday after sending text messages threatening to kill her, according to prosecutors.

Family members got wor-

ried and went to the home Sunday, where they found Billingsley and his current girlfriend, who has not been identified, loading personal items into his grandmother’s car. The pair reportedly fled on foot but were taken into custody in a wooded area near the home in the 1700 block of East Longwood Meadows Drive.

Billingsley was charged Monday with murder; the girlfriend was released.

On Tuesday, state District Judge Herb Ritchie set bond at $200,000.

Kunkel said she and Nathan Billingsley dated for about three years. He was a “class clown,” she said, calling him joyful and full of life.

“He was happy, jolly Nathan,” she said. “Before all the drugs, before everything, he was a very warm-hearted person.”

He wrote rap songs and performed magic tricks, but kept the secrets to the tricks to himself. And he was a daredevil, she said.

They each attended Clear Creek High School but didn’t meet until they both worked at Kroger in League City, where he was a bagger, and she was a cashier.

She said he lived with his mother for a time, then a brother, and finally moved to Cypress about two years ago to live with an uncle. He moved in with his grandmother after his uncle “got tired of him,” she said.

Things began to change a couple of years ago, she said.

First, he had bouts of depression and anger, and got involved with drugs. He told her he was unhappy, she said.

He tried repeatedly to get off drugs, she said, and had periods where his life seemed to improve, working long hours in his uncle’s auto shop.

She said she was shocked when she heard he’d been charged with murder.

“I really don’t know what happened with the kid at all,” she said. “He was a very hard-working kid when he put his mind to it.”