From left: Raechyl and Jayla Blackshear (GoFundMe) and Jalooni Blackshear (Anchorage Police Department).
An Alaska corrections officer has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the heinous crime of shooting his wife and daughter in the head. Following the murders, he attempted to escape justice by impersonating his deceased wife and even sent a birthday message to a surviving child, pretending it was from their mother.
Jalooni Blackshear received a 150-year prison sentence on Tuesday after confessing to the killings of his wife, Raechyl Blackshear, 35, and their 14-year-old daughter, Jayla Blackshear, as reported by the Alaska Department of Law.
The Anchorage Police Department began looking into Jalooni Blackshear on March 30, 2022, after Jayla accused her father of sexual abuse. In response, Blackshear persuaded his wife to bring Jayla back to the police on April 3, 2022, hoping she would retract her accusation.
Tragically, this was the last known sighting of Jayla and her mother alive.
Shortly afterward, Jalooni Blackshear fled Alaska, traveling eastward.
Prosecutors later discovered that after committing the murders, Blackshear used his victims’ phones to impersonate them, misleading his surviving children with messages that purportedly came from their mother, including a birthday greeting.
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.
