A New Jersey man has been sentenced to life imprisonment for orchestrating a deadly plot against his own father, motivated by financial gain. He attempted to cover his tracks with an alibi centered around a sandwich, but the plan ultimately failed.

Mark J. Austin, 34, was convicted by a jury in October 2025. The charges included murder and unlawful possession of a weapon, as detailed in a press release from the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office.

On Thursday, Criminal Division Presiding Judge Guy P. Ryan handed down a life sentence without parole to Austin for the murder-for-hire plot that resulted in the death of his father, Mark Richard Austin, 55.

“This sentence highlights the premeditated and ruthless nature of Austin’s actions,” stated Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer. “By plotting the murder of his father, Austin has relinquished any claim to leniency from the Court. The life sentence without parole reflects the gravity of his crimes, ensures lasting accountability, and guarantees that Austin will never again pose a threat to others.”

The events leading to the father’s murder unfolded over the summer of 2019, reaching a tragic conclusion that September.

On the fateful day, the elder Austin was brutally beaten to death with a baseball bat in his own residence. Prosecutors revealed that his son planned the attack with an accomplice, a former cellmate from a New Jersey juvenile detention center.

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.”