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Investigators Find Ali Muhammad Brown, a Suspect in Seattle Killings, Living in a Makeshift Camp in West Orange

Prosecutors charged him with killing college student Brendan Tevlin after linking the gun to two Seattle murders. He later admitted four killings.

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Illustration of police lights glowing through a rain-spotted windshield on a wooded road at night. Not the actual scene.

On July 18, 2014, investigators combing a wooded stretch of West Orange, New Jersey, found Ali Muhammad Brown living in a makeshift camp and took him into custody. The 29-year-old from Seattle was already a suspect in two killings on the other side of the country.

The arrest was made by the Essex County Prosecutor's Office homicide task force and West Orange police. On August 4, prosecutors charged Brown with murder, felony murder, robbery and weapons counts in the death of Brendan Tevlin, 19, a University of Richmond student from Livingston, who was shot near Northfield Avenue on June 25 and found dead in a Jeep in a West Orange parking lot. The gun that killed Tevlin, prosecutors said, was the same weapon used in two murders in Seattle. Two young West Orange men were charged with felony murder in the same case.

Brown, a registered sex offender, was also charged in a June 29 robbery and attempted carjacking in Point Pleasant, and a judge set his bail at $5 million. In September, court papers quoted what he had told a New Jersey investigator in July: "My mission is vengeance," for lives lost in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

On March 6, 2018, Brown pleaded guilty to murdering Tevlin and to first-degree terrorism, and admitted three killings in Washington state, which he described as part of a "Jihad." On May 1, 2018, he was sentenced to life without parole, the first defendant convicted under New Jersey's terrorism statute in connection with a homicide. In September 2022, a King County judge sentenced him to 93 years for killing Leroy Henderson, 30, in Skyway on April 27, 2014, and Ahmed Said, 27, and Dwone Anderson-Young, 23, in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood on June 1, 2014.

The Essex County Prosecutor's Office gave Brown's age as 34 when he pleaded guilty in March 2018 and as 33 when he was sentenced that May. Its 2014 release, which put him at 29, fits the second figure.

Sources