Family and loved ones of Dwone Anderson-Young mourned the 23-year-old’s murder at a vigil following the June 2014 murders (Image: CHS)

Ahmed Said was 27 when he was murdered

Ali Brown will serve for his 2014 killings including two men he met on Capitol Hill he lured with a dating app and murdered because they were gay.

Brown, already facing life in prison for shooting a man to death in New Jersey in the weeks after the slayings here, was sentenced Friday in King County court to 93 years for the killing of a man in Skyway and the murder of the two men he met on a night out on Capitol Hill.

Prosecutors say Brown was “jihad-inspired” when he murdered 23-year-old Dwone Anderson-Young and and 27-year-old Ahmed Said in the June 1st, 2014 slayings.

The two were shot to death early on a Sunday morning after a late spring night on Capitol Hill. Their bodies were found in the area of 29th and King near the home Anderson-Young shared with his mother.

Earlier that year, 30-year-old Leroy Henderson was walking home from a Skyway store when he was shot at least six times in the back by Brown according to prosecutors.

The violence continued that June. According to police, a friend told detectives Said and Anderson-Young were meeting up with a third man that night after partying at R Place but that he had a “bad feeling” about the stranger. The friend told police that at closing time, he, Said and Anderson-Young left the club to meet the man. The friend described the person as seeming “out of place.” Said offered to give the friend who talked to police a ride home but he said he declined the ride because he was “creeped out” by the man.

Another friend who met the group at R Place earlier in the night told police Said spent much of the evening on his phone and that he believed Said was using an app “like Grindr or Jack’d” — “apps on which gay men meet up with other gay men,” the police report noted. This friend told police he also saw the stranger with Said and Anderson-Young that night as they left R Place. That friend identified the suspect Brown out of a police photo montage and was “100 -percent certain” he was the same person he saw with the victims outside the club.

Detectives were also able to retrieve video surveillance from a nearby business showing Brown, Said, and Anderson-Young together. Police said shell casings at the murder scene matched a 9 MM Smith and Wesson semiautomatic pistol purchased by the mother of Brown’s children that she said had gone missing. The two men had been shot execution style, according to police.

According to media reports at the time, Brown had also been tangled up in an FBI investigation into possible terrorist activity a decade prior to the murders.

Prosecutors and police say Brown admitted killing his victims he met on Capitol Hill that night because they were gay and because of his extreme religious beliefs.

After his arrest and prosecution in New Jersey, Brown was extradited to Seattle in late 2019 to stand trial for the murders here. Brown pleaded guilty to those charges in June.

He will now be returned to New Jersey where he is to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

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