A man accused of going on a killing spree as part of a "jihad against Americans" was sentenced on Friday to nearly a century behind bars in connection to three murders in Washington state in 2014.
Ali Muhammad Brown, 37, had already been serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for a fourth murder later that same year in New Jersey, but sentencing for three counts of premeditated murder in Washington state did not come until Friday in King County Superior Court.
Judge Jim Rogers sentenced Brown to another 1,118 months. He is to serve that 93-year sentence consecutively, which should ensure he dies in prison.
Brown, an accused ISIS sympathizer, fatally shot 30-year-old Leroy Henderson along a stretch of a road in Skyway, a community south of Seattle, in April 2014 "as a test" to see if he could kill for the cause of avenging U.S. policy in the Middle East, Senior Deputy Prosecutor John Castleton said.
Five weeks later, Brown allegedly killed another two men, 27-year-old Ahmed Said and 23-year-old Dwone Anderson-Young, after allegedly targeting them because they were gay, The Seattle Times reported. He met them on the gay dating site Grindr and spent time with the two friends at a since-closed gay club in Seattle before killing them later that night.
Brown then fled to New Jersey, where he also murdered 19-year-old Brendan Tevlin later that June.
Tevlin was a student at the University of Richmond in Virginia, but he was back home for the summer in his native New Jersey when he was killed. During a 2018 court hearing, Brown admitted to the three other Washington killings, but that case had been delayed for years, N.Y. Daily News reported.
"Eight years I have been waiting for my justice," Falana Young, the mother of Dwone Anderson Young, told the court ahead of Friday’s sentencing, according to KING-TV.
"Your Honor, please give him the maximum of whatever you can do," Dwone’s grandmother, Shelly Young, added.
"I am regretful for killing those people," Brown told the Washington courtroom on Friday. "I ask for forgiveness from the families. I ask that they can forgive me. If they can’t, if not, just let me rot in hell if you want to if you want to say that, but that is not going to change the past."
