Jalonni Blackshear: Former Alaska Corrections Officer Sentenced to 150 Years for Killing Wife and Daughter
Jalonni Blackshear, 43, learned his punishment on June 2, 2026, when an Anchorage judge ordered him to serve 75 years for each murder, with the terms running consecutively.
The hearing came five months after Blackshear pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the killing of his wife Raechyl Blackshear, 35, and to second-degree murder for taking the life of his daughter Jayla, as per PEOPLE.
The chain of events that led to the sentence started on March 30, 2022, when 14-year-old Jayla told authorities she had been sexually abused, but refused to name the person responsible.
According to the Anchorage Police Department and the State of Alaska Department of Law, investigators eventually identified her father as the primary suspect.
Immediately after the report, Jalonni Blackshear reached out to his wife and persuaded her to bring Jayla to the police station to take back the allegation, and on April 3, 2022, Raechyl Blackshear took her daughter to the station to have the statement withdrawn.
That visit was the last time anyone saw either of them alive, as Raechyl never returned to her job, and Jayla did not go back to school.
A week later, authorities tracked Raechyl’s phone and Blackshear’s own device to Virginia and Maryland. Because messages appeared to still be coming from the missing mother and daughter's phones, police initially believed everyone was alive.
When Raechyl missed a scheduled medical appointment on April 15, 2022, officers were sent to perform a welfare check at the residence. Inside, they discovered the bodies of Raechyl and Jayla Blackshear, both dead from gunshot wounds.
According to detectives, Jalonni Blackshear entered the family home in the early morning hours of April 4, 2022, and shot both his wife and daughter in the head.
Then, he left their bodies in an upstairs bedroom, took their digital devices and, began impersonating them through text messages and social media, using a shared Apple iCloud account. For days, he posed as their mother and he even sent birthday wishes to his other children, investigators said.
On April 6, 2022, Blackshear flew out of Anchorage, after he already emailed a resignation letter to his employer at the Alaska Department of Corrections.
Jalonni Blackshear was later arrested in New York and brought back to Alaska to face a long list of charges.
A grand jury indicted him in May 2022 on two counts of first-degree murder, four counts of second-degree murder, along with charges of first-degree sexual abuse of a minor, first-degree sexual assault, incest, tampering with physical evidence, and forgery.
As part of the plea agreement accepted in January 2026, Blackshear admitted he knew he was the prime suspect in the sexual abuse of Jayla and that the shootings of his wife and daughter were unprovoked. The remaining charges, including those related to sexual abuse and evidence tampering, were dismissed under the deal.
At sentencing, Superior Court Judge Garton said Blackshear had “terrorized his family into silence” and that his ability to harm them depended on that silence.
The 150-year term ensures that the former officer will spend the rest of his life behind bars, closing a case that stretched from a teenager’s cry for help to a calculated and drawn-out attempt to cover up two murders with their own phones.
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