Christopher Johnson, a Washington state man who admitted to murdering a mother as she slept next to her husband and young son, now knows his fate.
A judge sentenced Johnson, 24, to 25 years in prison on Tuesday, months after he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in connection with the death of 36-year-old Irah Sok. Johnson’s 25-year sentence will run concurrently with a sentence a U.S. District Court judge handed down in connection with RICO charges stemming from a string of armed robberies and other violent crimes that took place in Washington state. The guilty plea on the murder charge out of Washington’s Snohomish County came as part of the federal plea agreement.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington said the judge recommended that Johnson serve his sentence in the Washington state prison system.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Sok was sleeping in bed alongside her husband and 7-year-old son during the early morning hours of Aug. 19, 2022, when Johnson and two of his alleged cohorts entered the Sok home before 3 a.m. Johnson shot Sok in the head, then forced her husband to the ground and restrained him with zip ties.
After Johnson and the other suspects “ransacked the victim’s belongings and stole thousands of dollars’ worth of luxury possessions,” they fled the scene. Sok’s husband then escaped and ran for help; the little boy remained uninjured.
Sok was a well-known photographer in the Everett, Washington, area who specialized in maternity and newborn photography. She opened her own studio just months before her death.
Federal prosecutors said Johnson, along with his co-defendants, researched targets on social media and cased their homes before striking. According to the indictment, a typical operation took place between 2 and 5 a.m., with participants falsely announcing themselves as law enforcement as they made entry.
Prosecutors said, “They wore masks and used zip ties to restrain the victims — including children as young as [9 years old]. They would steal any valuables they could ransack from these homes.”
Johnson’s federal sentence for the RICO charges, to which he pleaded guilty in February, also includes five years of supervised release.
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