Inset: Mark J. Austin (Ocean County Corrections). Background: The house where Austin had his father beaten to death in Brick Township, N.J. (Google Maps).
A New Jersey man will be spending the rest of his life behind bars for a money-fueled plot that took his father”s life in gruesome fashion and then tried to paper over the crime with a sandwich-focused alibi.
In October 2025, Mark J. Austin, 34, was found guilty by a jury of his peers on one count each of murder and unlawful possession of a weapon, according to a press release issued by the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office.
On Thursday, the defendant was sentenced by Criminal Division Presiding Judge Guy P. Ryan to life in prison without the possibility of parole over the murder-for-hire death of his own father, Mark Richard Austin, 55.
“This sentence underscores the calculated and merciless nature of Austin’s crimes,” Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer said in a statement. “By orchestrating the murder of his own father, Austin forfeited any right to now ask the Court for mercy. Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole reflects the severity of the crimes committed, delivers permanent accountability, and ensures that Austin will never again have the opportunity to harm another human being.”
The underlying incidents that led to the elder Austin’s death occurred throughout the summer of 2019 and culminated that September.
On the day in question, the victim was beaten to death in his own home with a baseball bat. The crime was planned by the man’s own son, in league with another man who the son previously bunked with in a Garden State juvenile detention facility, prosecutors said.
During the trial, the state’s star witness against him was the assailant himself, Jeray Melton, 34, who said he killed the victim at the defendant’s behest in exchange for an agreed upon sum of $50,000, according to court records obtained by NJ.com.
In 2020, Melton pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter for the crime after originally being charged with murder. He has yet to be sentenced and faces between 10 and 30 years in prison.
Melton told jurors the son wanted his father dead over money owed and “because of things he did to him in his childhood,” according to a courtroom report by the Asbury Park Press. But after the deed was done, the defendant apparently went back on the deal — only giving Melton some marijuana and a number of $20 bills he pulled from an ATM.
The witness said the son dropped him off at the father’s house on Acorn Drive in Brick Township, a medium-sized municipality located some 60 miles north of Atlantic City along the Jersey Shore.
Then, after the killing, the son picked Melton up, drove him home, then headed east to pick up some cheesesteaks in Philadelphia. That famed regional sandwich would later loom large in the narrative.
“Dad, you want a cheesesteak? I’m at Geno’s,” Mark J. Austin would text his father — well after the victim was already dead, prosecutors revealed during a detention hearing, the Park Press reported.
But that would-be alibi-like text message did not much inure to the defendant’s favor due to GPS data, a prosecutor explained, since it was not only sent “knowing his father is dead” but also because “his dead father’s phone is next to him.” Investigators would later track both the father’s and the son’s cellphones traveling along Route 70 toward Salem — where Melton lived at the time.
Melton said the trip home also included some cleanup efforts, according to law enforcement records obtained by Patch.com. There, the defendant had his ex-cellmate take off his clothes, put them in a garbage bag, douse them in bleach, and throw them away.
At around 7 p.m. on the night of the killing, Mark Richard Austin was found lying dead on a couch by a friend. Then, more friends, along with the victim’s ex-wife, arrived later to try and help — and the baseball bat used in the slaying was found still in the residence.
Also inside the house, investigators found a spoon, a belt and other items that may have been considered drug paraphernalia.
Later, in a recorded interview, the son told detectives his father had asked him to pick up a Black man who he did not know along the side of the road that day and stay at the house and wait for him while the older man was out buying heroin. In court, the defense claimed Melton acted on his own volition to kill the victim and steal the heroin.
The jury did not give much credence to that story.
And, while Mark J. Austin did not testify in his own defense, he did speak up during his sentencing hearing to profess his innocence.
“I had no involvement in my dad’s death,” he said softly, reading from a piece of paper. “He was an amazing dad, an amazing grandfather, and that’s how he should be remembered.”
Speaking on the defendant’s behalf was his mother’s fiance, who noted the defendant voluntarily submitted to a lie detector test and is an Eagle Scout. But the judge was unmoved, saying the New Jersey Supreme Court has found such tests to be unreliable and adding: “I think he lost his way from the scout model prior to September 2019.”
