SEATTLE (PIX11/AP) — King County prosecutors have filed a third aggravated murder count against a man also charged with murder in New Jersey, alleging the four killings are part of a “bloody crusade” to exact vengeance against the U.S. government for its foreign policies.
Prosecutors charged 29-year-old Ali Muhammad Brown on Wednesday with first-degree aggravated murder in the April 27 shooting of 30-year-old Leroy Henderson in Skyway, south of Seattle. Brown was earlier charged with aggravated murder in the June 1 shooting deaths of two young men in Seattle, Ahmed Said and Dwone Anderson-Young.
In June, the body of 19-year-old Brendan Tevlin, who was home from college, was found lifeless inside an SUV parked in a New Jersey neighborhood.
Authorities said Tevlin was found shot to death at about 1:30 a.m. in the driver’s seat of a Land Rover 4×4 parked near Walker Road and Northfield Avenue in West Orange.
Tevlin had just wrapped up his freshman year at the University of Richmond.
In early August in Newark, New Jersey, Brown pleaded not guilty in Tevlin’s murder, but admitted to all four killings Wednesday, according to the King County, Wash. court documents.
Brown allegedly confessed to all four killings, saying he was “just doing (his) small part,” according to court documents obtained by KCPQ. “My mission is vengeance. For the lives, millions of lives are lost every day,” he reportedly said. “Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, all these places where innocent lives are being taken every single day … All these lives are taken every single day by America, by this government. So a life for a life.”
He’s held on $5 million bail. His public defender had no comment at that appearance.
In court papers filed in Seattle, a King County sheriff’s detective says Brown’s statements to detectives show he committed the four murders “behind the common motive of vengeance for perceived acts of wrongdoing committed by the government of the United States.”