An Alaska corrections officer will spend the rest of his life behind bars after shooting his wife and daughter in the head, then fleeing the state while impersonating their mother and wishing a surviving child a happy birthday.
Jalooni Blackshear was sentenced to 150 years in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to the murders of his wife Raechyl Blackshear, 35, and his 14-year-old daughter Jayla Blackshear, the Alaska Department of Law announced.
The Anchorage Police Department opened an investigation into the defendant on March 30, 2022, when Jayla came forward to accuse her father of sexually abusing her. Upon learning of the accusation, Jalooni Blackshear persuaded his wife to bring Jayla back to the police department on April 3, 2022, in an effort to get her to recant her story.
That was the last time anyone saw Jayla or her mother alive.
Days later, Jalooni Blackshear fled the state and headed east.
“It was later discovered that after murdering his wife and child, he took their phones and pretended to be them, to include telling his surviving children that mommy missed them and to wish one a happy birthday,” prosecutors wrote.
When Raechyl Blackshear failed to appear for a doctor’s appointment on April 15, 2022, officers responded to her home and discovered her and Jayla dead from gunshot wounds to the head in an upstairs bedroom.
Investigators tracked the suspect to Staten Island, New York, through the victims’ phones and took him into custody.
At sentencing, Superior Court Judge Josie Garton found that Jalooni Blackshear had subjected his wife and daughters to years of physical and sexual violence. He terrorized them into silence, and when Jayla came forward to police, he killed her and her mother.
“In handing down the 150 year sentence, Judge Garton noted that Blackshear’s communication after the murders, where he impersonated his dead wife and child, were depraved, cruel and calculated,” prosecutors wrote.
Following the discovery of their bodies, Jayla Blackshear’s classmates and teachers gathered at a local park to hold a memorial in her honor.
“She was a fun, outgoing person who never let anyone put her down, and she always tried to make everyone else around her smile,” her friend Jalysa Osborne said.
Her teacher Shannon Velez struggled to accept that her student was gone.
“I kept telling myself it really wasn’t her. It really wasn’t. It’s not her, it’s not her,” Velez told the TV station.
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