From left: Raechyl and Jayla Blackshear (GoFundMe) and Jalooni Blackshear (Anchorage Police Department).
An Alaska corrections officer will spend the rest of his days behind bars after he shot his wife and daughter in the head and fled the state while pretending to be their mother and wishing a surviving child a happy birthday.
Jalooni Blackshear was sentenced to 150 years in prison on Tuesday after he pleaded guilty to the murders of his wife Raechyl Blackshear, 35, and his 14-year-old daughter Jayla Blackshear, the Alaska Department of Law said.
The Anchorage Police Department began investigating the defendant on March 30, 2022, when Jayla came forward to accuse her father of sexually abusing her. After learning of this, Jalooni Blackshear convinced his wife to bring Jayla back to the police department on April 3, 2022, in an attempt to recant her story.
That was the last time anyone saw Jayla and 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.
After Raechyl Blackshear did not show up for a doctor’s appointment on April 15, 2022, cops responded to her home and found her and Jayla dead from gunshot wounds to the head in an upstairs bedroom.
Through the victims’ phones, cops tracked the suspect to Staten Island, New York, and arrested him.
At sentencing, Superior Court Judge Josie Garton found that Jalooni Blackshear 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.
After the discovery of her and her mother’s bodies, Jayla Blackshear’s classmates and teachers held a memorial at a local park to honor her.
“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 told local NBC affiliate KTUU.
Her teacher Shannon Velez didn’t want to believe her student was dead.
“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.
