A few minutes before midnight on June 25, 2014, Brendan Tevlin was driving home to Livingston, New Jersey, after an evening with friends. He was nineteen and had just finished his freshman year at the University of Richmond. He had texted his mother that he was on his way. At the traffic light at Northfield Avenue and Walker Road in West Orange, less than ten minutes from his house, a man in camouflage stepped out of the bushes and fired into his Jeep through the passenger-side window.
The man was Ali Muhammad Brown, a Seattle drifter with a long criminal record who had crossed the country weeks earlier. Nobody in New Jersey yet knew that he was wanted in Seattle. Three weeks later he was found living in a camp in the West Orange woods, and the gun he had with him linked him to three killings in the Seattle area. Brown eventually admitted all four. He told investigators that the killings were acts of vengeance against the United States for deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world, and in 2018 he became the first person convicted under New Jersey's terrorism statute for a homicide.
Brown was born in the United States around 1985. His age is given differently from one report to the next: the Essex County Prosecutor's Office put him at 29 in 2014, 34 when he pleaded guilty in March 2018 and 33 when he was sentenced that May, and he was reported as 37 in September 2022. He was a U.S. citizen. When Seattle police named him as a suspect in June 2014, they described him as a transient who frequented South King County. He had children; the mother of his children had bought the pistol that prosecutors later tied to the killings, and she told investigators it had gone missing.
His record was long before 2014. From 2002 to 2004, according to the Seattle Times as reported by CBS News, Brown and three other men passed counterfeit and fake checks at banks in the Seattle area, including U.S. Bank, Bank of America, Key Bank, Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo and Boeing Employees Credit Union, withdrawing money before the checks were returned. He was convicted in federal court in 2005 of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and served federal prison time. NBC News reported in 2004 that he was one of at least thirteen Seattle-area residents accused in a wider scheme involving bringing people from Gambia into the country illegally. The Counter Extremism Project, a research group that tracks extremists, says the leader of the check ring, Ruben Shumpert, later skipped his federal sentencing and is believed to have died fighting for the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, and that the fraud was alleged to have helped fund that group. Capitol Hill Seattle reported in 2022 that, according to media reports at the time of the killings, Brown had been connected to an FBI terrorism investigation about a decade earlier. In January 2016 a New Jersey prosecutor told a judge that Brown was on a federal watch list; the FBI said it does not confirm or deny who is on its lists.
He also had convictions in Washington for sexual contact and aggravated assault, according to the Essex County Prosecutor's Office, and he was a registered sex offender. The Counter Extremism Project lists an assault conviction in 2008 and a 2012 conviction for communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, for which he received a year. By the time he was sentenced in New Jersey in 2018, prosecutors counted one juvenile arrest and nineteen adult arrests. His defense lawyers in Washington later told the court that he had been diagnosed with delusions and post-traumatic stress disorder, and the judge there referred to his "horrible childhood." The sources reviewed for this page give no further detail about his upbringing.
Leroy Henderson was thirty and came from Gary, Indiana. He had moved to Skyway, an unincorporated area just south of Seattle, to look after his uncle. Late on the night of April 27, 2014, he walked to a convenience store and bought soda and chips for his uncle. On the way back he was shot from behind, ten times in the back by the Seattle Times' account and at least six times by Capitol Hill Seattle's. He did not know the man who shot him. He had no criminal record.
The killing went unsolved for nearly four months. At the 2022 sentencing, King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor John Castleton said that Brown had shot Henderson "as a test," to see whether he was capable of killing for his cause. Henderson's cousin, Joanne Thornton, told the court that Brown had picked him at random. His uncle died a year after the shooting, she said, and his father a year after that, having lost the will to live.
Five weeks later Brown killed two young men in Seattle. Dwone Anderson-Young was twenty-three. He had graduated from the University of Washington, the first person in his family to finish college, and he lived with his mother, Falana Young, in the Leschi neighborhood. He had come out to her when he was fourteen, and she had told him that she loved him. Friends described him as wanting to become a mentor in the community. Ahmed Said was twenty-seven. The sources reviewed say little else about him. Neither man had a criminal record.
On the night of May 31, 2014, both men were on Capitol Hill, the center of Seattle's gay community. Investigators later learned that they had been at R Place, a gay club that has since closed, and at Hot Mama's Pizza. A friend told police that Said spent much of the evening on his phone, apparently on a dating app used by gay men; reports name Grindr, and one also mentions Jack'd. King County prosecutors said Brown had set up a profile on the app and messaged Said. At closing time the two men left to meet the stranger. Another friend had a bad feeling about him and turned down Said's offer of a ride home. That friend saw the man with Said and Anderson-Young as they left the club.
Said was driving. At about 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 1, neighbors in the 500 block of 29th Avenue South called 911 to report several shots. Officers arrived about a minute later and found both men dead in the street near 29th and King, three doors from Anderson-Young's home. Prosecutors said Brown shot them inside the car. Their bodies had been left in the street.
The first arrest was the wrong one. Later that Sunday, a man named Matalepuna Malu, 26, of Everett, became a person of interest after his brother called 911 and said Malu had phoned him, crying, to say he had shot someone. Police named Malu publicly. He called homicide detectives, said he was innocent, and turned himself in at Seattle police headquarters. He was held on a federal warrant and over an unrelated assault from earlier that day, and his family told reporters that police had the wrong man. He was not charged with the killings, and later reporting on the case does not mention him again.
From the start detectives believed someone else had been involved. Said's car, a Mitsubishi Galant, had been moved after the shootings; it was found abandoned at Wabash Avenue and South Cloverdale Street in South Seattle. "So we know there is at least one other suspect involved," Assistant Police Chief Carmen Best said on June 4. Police said they were looking at several possible motives, including a hate crime, and were "not taking anything off the table." Mayor Ed Murray called the killings "a tragic murder that has affected all of Seattle," touching, he said, the African American, East African and gay communities. On the evening of June 5 several hundred people gathered at 29th and South King Street for a vigil, and the two families held each other.
That same day Seattle police named a second suspect: Ali Muhammad Brown, 30, described as about five feet nine and 190 pounds, a transient who might be armed. The evidence against him, as later laid out in charging papers and in court, came from several directions. Surveillance video from a nearby business showed Brown with Said and Anderson-Young. The friend who had seen the stranger leaving R Place picked Brown out of a photo montage and said he was certain. Shell casings at the scene matched a 9mm Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol, the one bought by the mother of Brown's children. Police lifted a palm print from inside the victims' car that matched Brown, and investigators followed surveillance footage of a distinctive Dodge Durango SUV. King County prosecutors charged him with aggravated first-degree murder in both deaths. By then Brown had left Washington.
Brendan Tevlin grew up in Livingston, in Essex County, New Jersey. A relative called him "the best big brother to his three siblings." He went to Seton Hall Prep, where classmates remembered his love of lacrosse and country music. His uncle Joe Callaghan described him as a straight-A student with "not an enemy in the world." At the University of Richmond he played club lacrosse; the student newspaper later wrote about his optimism, his bagpipe playing and what friends called his "Tev-style smile." His younger sister Michaela later enrolled at Richmond too.
On the night of June 25, 2014, he was home for the summer and had been visiting a friend. He called a family member, and texted his mother, to say he was coming home. According to the University of Richmond's student paper, which reported on the plea hearing, Brown had been waiting in bushes near the intersection for about half an hour, in camouflage, with a scarf over his face. When Tevlin's Jeep Liberty stopped at the light, Brown opened fire through the passenger-side window. The number of shots varies between accounts: about ten according to prosecutors at the time of the arrest, with more fired as Tevlin tried to get out; sixteen according to the prosecutor's office in 2018.
Brown then drove the Jeep, with Tevlin's body inside, about a mile to the parking lot of the Ron Jolyn apartment complex at 275 Northfield Avenue, where he left it after taking some of Tevlin's belongings. Police had answered reports of gunshots near the intersection at about midnight. Tevlin was found dead in the Jeep in the lot, with the driver's and passenger windows shattered. Former classmates held a vigil at Seton Hall Prep, and more than a thousand people attended his funeral, where Michaela gave the eulogy.
Brown stayed in New Jersey and kept moving. The Essex County Prosecutor's Office later charged him with a robbery and attempted carjacking on June 29 in Point Pleasant, on the Jersey Shore, in Ocean County. Patch gives the date of that incident as June 25; this page follows the prosecutor's date. According to Patch, the Point Pleasant Beach incident was how authorities learned that Brown was in New Jersey: he left a handprint, and he left items at a nearby convenience store where a security camera recorded a clear image of his face. An Ocean County official said he had left "a few calling cards." CBS New York reported that the robbery took place at a coffee shop.
Back in West Orange, Brown moved between two campsites in the woods between Mount Pleasant and Northfield avenues. At about 6 a.m. on July 10, a man was opening the passenger door of his car in the parking lot of an apartment complex in the 200 block of Mount Pleasant Avenue when a robber in a mask and camouflage confronted him at gunpoint, took his wallet and other belongings, and ordered him into the trunk of his car. According to the Counter Extremism Project, Brown used fake identification, camouflage and disguises to stay ahead of the police for nearly a month.
On July 18, 2014, investigators from the Essex County Prosecutor's Office Homicide/Major Crimes Task Force and West Orange police searched a wooded area off Mount Pleasant Avenue and found Brown living in a makeshift camp near the apartment complex. They took him into custody. At the campsite they seized a loaded 9mm handgun, the July 10 robbery victim's driver's license, a mask and a camouflage jacket. They also found a journal. Prosecutors later said it contained handwritten passages about wanting to engage in jihad and travel to conflict zones in the Middle East, and that Brown had written that he planned to follow the Islamic State and "learn the ways of jihadis."
Investigators entered the ballistics from the Tevlin shooting into a national database. The result matched the gun used in the Seattle killings. On August 4, 2014, Acting Essex County Prosecutor Carolyn A. Murray, Newark Police Director Eugene Venable and West Orange Police Chief James P. Abbott announced that Brown had been charged with murder, felony murder, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery and two weapons offenses in Tevlin's death, and with the Point Pleasant robbery and attempted carjacking. Judge Ronald D. Wigler set his bail at $5 million.
Two young West Orange men were charged with him: Jeremy Villagran, 19, who lived in the apartment complex where the Jeep was found, and Eric Williams, 18. Each was charged with felony murder, robbery, conspiracy and weapons offenses and held on $1 million bail. Early reports said two men had followed Tevlin in another car and helped surround his Jeep. When the grand jury indicted Brown in July 2015, the prosecutor's office dismissed all charges against Villagran and Williams. "Based on the evidence and the information we have at this time, we believe this is the appropriate course of action," Murray said. Brown was the only person convicted.
Brown talked to detectives. After his arrest he described himself to them as a strict Muslim angered by what the U.S. government had done in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, where, he said, its actions had killed innocent civilians and children. He told them his mission was vengeance: because Americans took lives every day, lives should be taken in return. In a recorded interview in New Jersey on July 25, 2014, he described what he called a "just kill": an adult man with no women, children or elderly people present. Those statements were set out in a probable cause certification filed on August 18, 2014, by King County Sheriff's Detective John Pavlovich.
On August 20, 2014, King County prosecutors filed a third count of aggravated first-degree murder against Brown, for Leroy Henderson. It was the first public link between Brown and the Skyway shooting. In court papers they described a "bloody crusade" over about two months, four killings with one gun, aimed at punishing the U.S. government for its foreign policy. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said the killings appeared to be unprovoked and showed "an extreme level of violence." Under Washington law, aggravated murder then carried a possible death sentence. Brown told investigators that he had killed Said and Anderson-Young because they were gay.
Court papers in New Jersey later quoted Brown telling an investigator that he regarded the murder of Brendan Tevlin as his mission, an act of retaliation for lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran.
On July 2, 2015, an Essex County grand jury returned a nine-count indictment against Brown: two counts of terrorism, murder, felony murder, carjacking, robbery and several weapons offenses, including possession of hollow-point bullets. Acting Prosecutor Murray had needed approval from Acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman to present the terrorism charge. New Jersey had passed its terrorism statute after the September 11 attacks. It covers violent crimes, including murder, committed with the intent to promote an act of terror, and unlike most federal terrorism laws it does not require any link to a terrorist organization. It had never before been used in a murder case. Murray said the decision followed from evidence developed after the arrest. Brown pleaded not guilty on August 4, 2015.
Brown's first trial in New Jersey was for the July 10 robbery. On November 17, 2015, an Essex County jury convicted him of robbery and weapons offenses. Because he had three prior felony convictions, he was eligible for an extended term, and on January 20, 2016, Judge Michael Petrolle sentenced him to 35 years for the robbery and weapons counts plus a consecutive eighteen months for the hollow-point bullets, 36 years and 6 months in all, with 33 years to serve before parole eligibility. "There is an overwhelming need to deter this defendant," Assistant Prosecutor Jamel Semper told the court. Brown refused to take part in most hearings in this period, according to the Associated Press; he said little, would not sign papers, and sat surrounded by ten sheriff's officers.
Jury selection in the Tevlin case began in the last days of February 2018, with opening statements expected the following week. On March 6, Brown told the prosecutors he wanted to plead guilty. There was no plea agreement. "We did not negotiate with this defendant," Acting Essex County Prosecutor Robert D. Laurino said. Before Judge Wigler, Brown pleaded guilty to all seven remaining counts: first-degree murder, first-degree terrorism, first-degree felony murder, first-degree carjacking, first-degree robbery, unlawful possession of a handgun and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose.
He went further than the charges required. Without prompting, according to NBC News, he admitted the three killings in Washington, which he described as part of a "jihad." He said he had killed Said and Anderson-Young because he believed they were gay, and that Henderson's killing had been a road-rage incident, according to the prosecutor's office. He told the court he had been "stupid" and had followed a mistaken ideology. NJ.com quoted him: "The mistake that I made is I thought I was fighting jihad." Semper told reporters that Brown had been "clearly radicalized online," had wanted to make himself a martyr and was not one, and was now "just an admitted terrorist" who would spend the rest of his life in prison.
Brown was sentenced in Newark on May 1, 2018. More than a hundred of Tevlin's relatives and friends filled the courtroom, and for more than half an hour they spoke. Michaela Tevlin talked about holidays and milestones that would never feel complete, and about the fear she now felt driving alone at night. Their grandfather, Tom Tevlin Sr., said Brendan would have been a great success and would have helped people less fortunate than himself. Their mother, Allison Tevlin, called her son "a sincere good soul" and "an amazing son." She said the man who killed him was "beneath our contempt" and that she was grateful he would never be paroled.
Brown spoke for about six and a half minutes. He said he would not look at the family because he did not want to disrespect them. "I would like to say that I apologize to his parents," he said. "I know that I made a mistake, that I killed someone." He then asked to be treated as a human being, called himself a saint, and said he regretted nothing, because what he had done had made him who he was. Tom Tevlin Sr. said afterward that the lack of regret "says it all."
Semper asked for three consecutive life terms. Judge Wigler, who said that in more than eight years on the bench this was one of the most brutal crimes to come before him, imposed life without parole, which the terrorism count alone required. CBS New York reported that the judge imposed three concurrent life terms for terrorism and murder plus sixty years for the carjacking, robbery and weapons counts. It was the first homicide conviction under New Jersey's terrorism law. An Ocean County sentencing for the Point Pleasant robbery was scheduled for May 11, 2018; the sources reviewed do not give its outcome. Laurino told reporters that Washington authorities, who could have sought the death penalty, had decided not to.
Brown was brought to Washington on October 30, 2019, under an agreement between the two states' governors, and booked into the King County Jail on the three aggravated murder charges. Despite his admissions in Newark, he pleaded not guilty on November 13, 2019. The case then sat for more than two years. In June 2022 he pleaded guilty to three counts of premeditated first-degree murder. There was no trial.
He was sentenced in King County Superior Court on Friday, September 9, 2022, before Judge Jim Rogers. Falana Young told the court she had waited eight years. Her son had been brilliant, she said, a University of Washington graduate, the first in the family to finish college, and the family had had to identify him through his orthodontic records. She said Brown's crime came from his own self-hatred, and asked for the maximum. Dwone's grandmother, Shelly Young, said, "Your Honor, please give him the maximum of whatever you can do." Joanne Thornton spoke for Leroy Henderson's family. The sources reviewed do not report any statement from Ahmed Said's family.
Prosecutor Castleton asked for a sentence that would amount to life, pointing out that no one could be sure New Jersey's sentences would stay as they were as laws changed. Defense attorney George Eppler asked that the Washington time run at the same time as the New Jersey sentence. Brown, who had stared straight ahead for most of the two-hour hearing, apologized to the families and asked their forgiveness. "I am regretful for killing those people," he said. He said he had been misguided by "Islamic jihad" and would be a better man, and that he wished he could go back and change what he had done. Rogers said Brown's childhood could not outweigh the number and seriousness of the killings or the danger he posed. He imposed 1,118 months, about 93 years, to run after the New Jersey sentence, and told Brown he would be in prison for the rest of his natural life. Family members in the gallery applauded. Brown was to be returned to New Jersey to serve his sentence there.
Brown is serving life without parole in the New Jersey state prison system. He also holds the 36-and-a-half-year New Jersey robbery sentence, and the 93-year Washington sentence is to be served after the New Jersey term. He has pleaded guilty to every killing he was charged with, in both states, and no appeal or later court action was found in the sources reviewed for this page. He was about forty-one in 2026.
Proven by guilty plea: the murders of Brendan Tevlin (New Jersey, 2018) and of Leroy Henderson, Ahmed Said and Dwone Anderson-Young (Washington, 2022), and terrorism under New Jersey law. Proven at trial: the July 10, 2014, armed robbery in West Orange.
Unresolved or disputed points in the sources:
Accomplices. Jeremy Villagran and Eric Williams were charged in Tevlin's killing in 2014 and early reports described two men following Tevlin's car with Brown, but all charges against them were dropped in July 2015 and no one but Brown was convicted. In Seattle, police believed at first that at least one other person was involved and briefly held Matalepuna Malu; he was never charged.
Motive in the Henderson killing. Prosecutors in Washington said Brown shot Henderson as a test of whether he could kill for his cause. The Essex County Prosecutor's Office reported that Brown described it as a road-rage incident.
Terrorist ties. Brown's 2014 statements and journal show that he presented the killings as jihad. Claims about his earlier ties to al-Shabaab through the 2002 to 2004 check ring, and about a federal watch list, were made by advocacy researchers and by a prosecutor in court; the FBI would not confirm them, and Brown was never charged with any federal terrorism offense.
Shot counts and dates. Accounts differ on how many times Tevlin and Henderson were shot, and Patch dates the Point Pleasant incident to June 25 where the prosecutor's office says June 29.
New Jersey's terrorism statute, unused in a homicide case for more than a decade after it was passed, was applied for the first time in Brown's case, and his life sentence rested on that count alone. In Seattle, the double killing of two young gay men on their way home from Capitol Hill, followed by the news that their killer had chosen them for that reason, drew the mayor, the city's LGBT Commission and community groups to the vigil in Leschi. At the 2018 sentencing Michaela Tevlin described a fear of driving alone at night that she had not had before. At the 2022 sentencing Falana Young said her life had been on hold for eight years.
2002 to 2004: Brown takes part in a check-fraud ring in the Seattle area; convicted of federal bank fraud conspiracy in 2005.
April 27, 2014: Leroy Henderson, 30, is shot and killed in Skyway, Washington.
June 1, 2014: Ahmed Said, 27, and Dwone Anderson-Young, 23, are shot and killed in Seattle's Leschi neighborhood after leaving Capitol Hill.
June 5, 2014: Seattle police name Brown as a suspect; a vigil is held at 29th and South King Street.
June 25, 2014: Brendan Tevlin, 19, is shot and killed at a traffic light in West Orange, New Jersey.
June 29, 2014: Robbery and attempted carjacking in Point Pleasant, New Jersey.
July 10, 2014: Armed robbery in West Orange; the victim is forced into his car trunk.
July 18, 2014: Brown is found in a camp in the West Orange woods and arrested with a 9mm handgun.
July 25, 2014: Recorded interview describing "just kills."
August 4, 2014: New Jersey murder charges announced; bail set at $5 million.
August 20, 2014: King County adds a third aggravated murder count, for Henderson.
July 2, 2015: Nine-count indictment including terrorism; charges against two co-defendants dropped.
November 17, 2015: Convicted of the West Orange robbery.
January 20, 2016: Sentenced to 36 years and 6 months for the robbery.
March 6, 2018: Pleads guilty to Tevlin's murder and terrorism; admits the Washington killings.
May 1, 2018: Sentenced to life without parole in Newark.
October 30, 2019: Brought to King County to face the Washington charges.
June 2022: Pleads guilty to three counts of premeditated first-degree murder.
September 9, 2022: Sentenced to 93 years, consecutive to the New Jersey sentence.