On August 15, 2024, recent NAU graduate working as a project engineer, 24-year-old Alijah Bradley, was reported as a missing person in Gilbert, Arizona. He missed work and his mom hadn’t heard from him either.
Alijah’s mom used the Life360 app on her phone and tracked her son’s phone to a place she was familiar with.
“She signed back in and saw that his last location was at Sam’s apartment,” an anonymous relative said. “And then all of the sudden his phones were just off.”
The relative allegedly said 23-year-old Samuel Bush was a childhood friend of Alijah’s, but when confronted about Alijah’s phone pinging there last, he told his family he didn’t know where Alijah was.
That’s when Alijah’s family called Toyota to see if they could get the GPS coordinates of his car, which they relayed to police.
“They gave them the coordinates that the car was in the middle of nowhere,” she said.
The desolate desert near Gila Bend was a new lead for police.
On August 19, they found not only his car but the remains of Alijah.
This relative described what they were told about the conditions, which were far more heinous than expected.
“I was told his cause of death was getting shot in the back and that they found him without his head,” she said. “And something so cruel and so graphic, like it’s almost crazy to think that somebody is capable of doing that.”
Sam Bush was arrested a day after the discovery, but at that point, only for growing and distributing marijuana and mushrooms from his apartment. Then, on September 4, he was hit with second-degree murder and concealing body parts charges, too.
Samuel Bush is now being held on a $1.5 million cash-only bond.
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