Ashley Jones was fourteen when she would participate in the murders of her grandfather and aunt and attempted murders of her sister and grandmother. According to court documents Ashley family did not approve of her relationship with Geramie Hart who was sixteen years old. On the day of the attack Ashley and Geramie would enter the home and would shoot seventy six year old Deroy Nalls twice in the head before going into the bedroom of thirty year old Millie Nalls who would be shot three times but would not die immediately, the woman was beaten, stabbed and set on fire. Seventy five year old Mary Nalls would be shot in the shoulder.
Deroy Nalls who was still alive would be stabbed repeatedly before being set on fire. Ashley sister, Mary Jones, who was ten years old would be stabbed repeatedly by Ashley. Ashley and Geramie Hart would steal money from the home before setting the home on fire. Mary Jones and Mary Nalls would escape from the home and alerted authorities. The two teen killers would be sentenced to life without parole
Ashley Jones 2023 Information
Inmate:
JONES, ASHLEY
AIS:
00216506
Institution:
TUTWILER ANNEX
Ashley Jones Other News
Geramie Hart, who celebrated his 16th birthday a few weeks before these crimes, and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Ashley Jones, apparently planned to kill members of Ashley’s family because her family did not approve of Ashley’s relationship with Hart. Ashley and her 10-year-old sister, Mary Jones, lived with their grandparents, 76-year-old Deroy Nalls and 75-year-old Mary Nalls. One of Deroy and Mary’s daughters and Ashley’s aunt, 30-year-old Millie Nalls, also lived in the house.
Late in the evening on August 29, 1999, Deroy was in the den watching television. His wife, daughter, and younger granddaughter were asleep in their rooms. Ashley let Hart into the house; he was armed with Deroy’s .38 caliber pistol, which Ashley had given him earlier. Ashley and Hart entered the den, and Hart shot Deroy twice in the face. Deroy did not die immediately; he stumbled toward the kitchen.
Ashley Jones and Hart then entered Millie’s bedroom and shot her three times. She survived the gunshots, and they then hit her with portable heaters, stabbed her in the chest, and set her room on fire. The pair next entered Mary Nalls’s bedroom and fired the last bullet from the gun into her shoulder. Hart was wearing a bandana over his face, but Ashley’s grandmother recognized him. Hart also identified himself to Mrs. Nalls.
Ashley Jones and Hart returned to discover that Deroy was still alive. Hart hit him with various objects and stabbed him repeatedly, leaving the knife in his back. Ashley poured charcoal lighter fluid on her grandfather and set him on fire. Ashley’s sister, Mary, woke up and Ashley led her into the kitchen area. She saw her grandfather on the floor of the den; he was on fire but still alive, Mary said. Hart forced Deroy Nalls to disclose where he kept his money, and after Mr. Nalls complied, Hart stabbed him in the throat. Mrs. Nalls who survived after being stabbed, could not remember whether Hart or Ashley had stabbed her.
Ashley poured the charcoal fluid on Mrs. Nalls, then they set her on fire. Ashley and Hart watched Mrs. Nalls burn, and Hart urged Ashley to pour more of the flammable liquid on her. Mary Jones attempted to leave the kitchen, but Ashley Jones grabbed her sister and began hitting her. Hart pointed the gun at the 10-year-old and said, “This is how you are going to die.” (R. 686.) Ashley said, “No, let me do it,” and stabbed her sister 14 times. Hart and Ashley piled sheets, towels, and paper on the floor and set the pile on fire.
Hart and Ashley Jones took $300 that was hidden beneath Deroy and Mary Nalls’s mattress and drove away in the Nallses’ vehicle. Mary Jones, who had pretended to be dead, helped her grandmother out of the house and contacted others for assistance.
The coroner determined that Deroy and Millie Nalls died from the stab and gunshot wounds they sustained. He testified that both victims suffered greatly from their wounds before they died. Mary Jones was treated for the numerous stab wounds Ashley inflicted. Mary Nalls, who sustained burns to 35% of her body, was taken to a burn unit, where she was also treated for the gunshot and stab wounds she suffered. She was hospitalized for weeks, received skin grafts, and underwent extensive rehabilitative therapy.
Hart and Ashley Jones were arrested the next morning in a hotel room. The Nallses’ vehicle was in the parking lot of the hotel. Hart and Jones gave voluntary statements describing their involvement in the murders and attempted murders of Jones’s family members.
Sarah Johnson was sixteen years old when she was charged with her parents murders. According to court documents Sarah Johnson would fatally shoot her mother who was sleeping in her bed and would then fatally shoot her father who was in a bathroom nearby. At trial prosecutors would point to a wealth of DNA evidence in order to convict her. Sarah Johnson would deny that she had anything to do with her parents murders and continues to fight her conviction. The judge would sentence the teen killer to two life terms and she remains in a Idaho prison
Sarah Johnson 2023 Information
SARAH MARIE JOHNSON #77613
Mailing Address:
POCATELLO WOMAN’S CORRECTIONAL CENTER, UNIT 4 1451 Fore Road Pocatello, Idaho 83205
Sarah Johnson Other News
The Idaho Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from a Blaine County woman who was convicted of killing her parents while still a teen in 2003.
Sarah Marie Johnson was sentenced to life without parole in 2005 for fatally shooting her father, 46-year-old Alan Johnson, and mother, 52-year-old Diane Johnson. At the time, prosecutors said Johnson killed her parents after fighting with them over her relationship with an older man.
In a ruling handed down Friday, the Idaho Supreme Court said Johnson’s two fixed life sentences don’t violate the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.×
The unanimous court agreed that two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings forbid mandatory life sentences for juveniles. But they said those rulings didn’t impact Johnson’s case because the sentencing judge considered her age — 16 years old — as a mitigating factor before sentencing her to life in prison.
That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court rulings left it up to states to decide how to enforce the constitutional restrictions on juvenile sentences, essentially requiring that a judge consider the juvenile offender’s youth and attendant characteristics before determining that life without parole is appropriate, the Idaho Supreme Court found.
The trial court in Johnson’s case held a hearing to determine whether the crime was one that “reflected the transient immaturity of youth,” Idaho Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Burdick wrote in Friday’s ruling. That hearing was the sentencing hearing, Burdick wrote, during which experts testified about the developmental state of an adolescent’s brain, among other things. The trial judge also made specific references to Johnson’s youth during the sentencing, showing that it was weighed against the heinous nature of her crimes, the high court found.
That’s enough to satisfy the requirements of the U.S. Supreme Court rulings, Burdick wrote.
“We recognize the holdings in Miller and Montgomery apply to Idaho, but affirm the district court’s ruling that the substantive requirement in those cases — that the sentencing court holds a hearing that considers the youth of the offender — was met,” Burdick wrote.
The Idaho Supreme Court also found that Johnson isn’t entitled to have new testing run on DNA samples collected after the murders, and that claims that her attorney was ineffective during an earlier post-conviction appeal aren’t a sufficient reason to justify a second post-conviction appeal.
With the slip of a tongue, a teenage girl admitted to brutally gunning down her parents in their bedroom, according to an inmate who shared a jail cell with her.
Convicted felon Malinda Gonzales told jurors Wednesday that Sarah Johnson talked freely while she awaited trial on charges of first-degree murder for her parents’ deaths.
“I would ask her questions over and over again,” Gonzales said. “One time, she said, ‘When I killed …’.” Then she stopped herself and was like, ‘When the killers …’.”
“What did she say to that?” Blaine County prosecutor Jim Thomas asked.
“She just looked at me, and I was like, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to rat on you,'” Gonzales said. “I didn’t think I would.”
More than a year later, the two “bunkies” were reunited in Ada County Courthouse Wednesday, where prosecutors are arguing that Sarah killed her parents, Diane and Alan Johnson, because they disapproved of her Mexican boyfriend.
Johnson faces life in prison if convicted.
Gonzales and several other witnesses who spent time in custody with Sarah testified that she freely volunteered details about her rocky relationship with her parents — particularly her mother — and of her acrimonious relationship with relatives in the wake of the murders.
But for all Sarah’s talk, each witness — except Gonzales — conceded that the defendant never admitted to killing her parents on September 2, 2003.
“She said she’d have knock-down, drag-out fights with her mom because she favored her brother and would give him anything,” Gonzales said.
Members of Sarah’s family in court, including her brother, Matt, winced as the five-time convicted drug trafficker offered her blunt assessments on the witness stand.
“But she loved her dad; she was a daddy’s girl. She said her father had changed the life insurance and she was going to get everything because her brother was not really his kid,” Gonzales said.
Sarah, now 18, has been in custody since October 31, 2003, when she was arrested almost two months after the murders.
One of her former inmates said Sarah claimed her brother Matt refused to post her bond, even though he had the means to do so.
“She pretty much despised him because after the murders, he spent the insurance claims on a [Chevy] Suburban and a house and getting married, while she was in jail,” said Autumn Fisher, who spent 16 days in jail with Sarah.
Novetta Hartmann, who spent 10 days with Sarah, said things were not much better with her aunts and uncles.
“She talked about how her family had kind of dismissed her and when she was living [with them], they tapped her phone and conned her into going to the burial so they could arrest her,” Hartmann told jurors.
“She talked a lot about the insurance money and about taking her guardian, Pat, on a cruise to Mexico or something,” she said.
The guardian, Pat Alder, blew Sarah a kiss from the witness stand Wednesday, and was dismissed quickly when she refused to answer prosecutors’ questions.
Hartmann testified that her parents seemed to be the least of Sarah’s concerns when she was in prison.
“She was upset a couple times because she went to court and it wasn’t on TV. She would say, ‘It should be on TV,'” Hartmann said. “When the case was going, she was upset she couldn’t wear regular clothes, had to wear her oranges.”
Each day before court, when Sarah Johnson arrives to the Ada County Courthouse from the county jail, a member of the defense team provides her with business-casual attire, jewelry and make-up. Her hair is always neatly coiffed.
Prosecutors are expected to rest their case this week. The trial is being aired live on Court TV.
Nathan Johnson was sixteen when he took part in the brutal murder of a man. According to court documents Nathan Johnson, his brothers Anthony Johnson and Brian Johnson Jr along with Michael Gunn would lure the victim over to a home where he was beaten, sexually assaulted, murdered and set on fire. The group thought that the victim had sexually assaulted the Nathan’s mother. This teen killer was sentenced to seventy five year in prison
Nathan Johnson brutally beat and sodomized a man before setting his corpse on fire when he was 16-years-old. Now, he will spend 75 years in jail for those gruesome actions.
The following was released by the State Attorney’s Office :
Nathan Johnson sat motionless as a 75-year sentence was handed down to him.
On Friday afternoon, Judge Harb sentenced Johnson to 75 years for first-degree murder, 40 years for sexual battery, 15 years for abuse of a dead human body, and five years for tampering with physical evidence, all to run concurrent with each other. Johnson was also labeled as a sexual predator.
Following a jury trial, jurors deliberated nearly three hours before finding Johnson guilty of these charges on Aug. 17, 2017. Because Johnson was 16 when he committed murder, a separate sentencing hearing was held Friday.
Johnson and three other co-defendants – Michael Gunn, Anthony Johnson, and Brian Johnson Jr. – suspected Robert Banks had raped Johnson’s mother, so on Jan. 14, 2016, they lured him over with the intent to beat him up.
“They were lying in wait inside the house,” said Assistant State Attorney Mark Levine. “When confronted about the baseless accusation of the sexual battery of their mother, Banks said he absolutely did not touch her.”
But Johnson and his co-defendants didn’t like that answer. They charged Banks, who tried to run to safety, but they slammed the door in his face and began to beat him up.
Levine told jurors Johnson and his friends would run across the room to kick him as hard as they could in the face and in the head – they shattered his face in the process. A co-defendant then grabbed a pipe and split his head open.
“They destroyed this man,” Levine said.
Close to the last minutes of his life, Johnson grabbed a flashlight and sexually battered Banks with it while taunting him. He then helped his brother tighten an electrical cord around Banks’ neck.
“The defendant jumps on his (Banks’) back and was holding him down while kicking and punching, tightening the electrical cord, choking the life out of him,” Levine said. “Banks’ life was over, but the story and nightmare wasn’t.”
Johnson memorialized the murder by taking multiple cell phone photos of Banks’ beaten and battered body. He sent those photos to his mother.
After killing Banks and taking photos of him, Johnson called his father – Brian Johnson Sr. – to tell him what they’d accomplished. His father came over to help them dispose of the body to keep them from getting caught.
They wrapped Banks with trash bags and a blanket, loaded him into a jeep, and drove to Sumter County. Banks’ body was dumped into the woods and set on fire.
But Levine said their trip to Sumter County didn’t end there. Johnson and his co-defendants went to Circle K to buy drinks, and they were caught on the surveillance video.
“This man and his cohorts didn’t have a care in the world,” Levine told jurors. “They were laughing and smiling.”
When they returned to Polk County, Johnson and his co-defendants discarded the pipe and burned the mattress Banks’ body was laid on and clothes he was wearing.
The next day, Banks’ body was spotted by a man driving his Jeep on trails in the woods. Law enforcement was called, and an investigation began, leading back to Johnson.
At first, Levine said, Johnson kept denying his involvement. But he eventually confessed to luring Banks, beating him and taking the “trophy” photos of the aftermath.
Levine said Johnson’s actions proved he intended to kill Banks. Once the plan was in motion, Johnson made conscious decisions and choices that led to one conclusion: Banks would be beaten until he was dead.
But not only was Banks beaten, he was sexually battered.
“The defendant was the one who took joy and twisted excitement in sexually battering him, and he memorialized it in taking a picture of it,” Levine said in his closing arguments. “He (Johnson) said and did things that make his intent explicitly clear.”
“These are conscious choices this man made to brutally beat, sexually batter, burn and discard another human being. He deserves to be held accountable for his actions,” Levine said.
Nathan Johnson More News
Nathan Johnson, who was two days shy of his 17th birthday the day Robert Banks was brutally beaten and sodomized in January 2016, has been sentenced to 75 years in prison for Banks’ murder.
In his trial a year ago, prosecutors presented evidence of photos on Johnson’s cellphone showing Banks on a bloody mattress after he’d been beaten and sodomized with a long-handle flashlight.
A jury of eight men and four women deliberated about three hours before convicting Johnson, then 18, of first-degree murder, sexual battery, tampering with physical evidence and abuse of a dead human body.
In a written order released Friday, Circuit Judge Jalal Harb ruled that he took Johnson’s age and maturity at the time of the murder into consideration when determining his sentence. Sentencing was delayed as the courts grappled with changes to juvenile sentencing rules. He noted that Johnson, along with his two older brothers and a close friend, who also was older, all were acting on the accusation that Banks had raped the Johnsons’ mother when they lured Banks to their house and beat him.
“It is plausible that the presence and participation of his older brothers amounted to an encouraging factor,” Harb wrote in his 10-page order.
When assessing any effect Johnson’s maturity may have had on his decisions the day Banks died, Harb stated: “The defendant, his brothers and their friend decided to take action against the victim instead of reporting the accusation of rape to law enforcement. The life of Mr. Banks did not matter to them.”
Nathan Johnson, now 19, faced a minimum 40-year term and maximum life sentence for first-degree murder.
In addition to the 75-year term for the murder conviction, Harb imposed a 40-year sentence for sexual battery, along with 15 years for abuse of a dead human body and five years for tampering with physical evidence, all to run concurrently.
Nathan Johnson is the second of the three brothers to be sentenced for Banks’ murder. His older brother, Anthony, 21, was convicted of first-degree murder earlier this month and sentenced to life imprisonment. Another brother, Brian, 25, was found guilty of second-degree murder in April and faces up to life imprisonment when he’s sentenced Sept. 6.
Gunn, 27, also was sentenced to life imprisonment after a jury convicted him in January of first-degree murder and related charges.
The four defendants had lured Banks, 31, to the Johnsons’ Lakeland home on the guise of a drug deal, according to court testimony. Banks denied their allegations of rape, even as they continued to assault him.
Nathan Johnson was accused of sodomizing Banks with the flashlight.
After Banks died, the brothers called their father, Brian Johnson Sr., who accompanied them to Sumter County to dispose of Banks’ body in a wooded area. Before leaving, they doused the body in gasoline and set it on fire, according to court testimony.
In an agreement with prosecutors, Johnson Sr., 49, pleaded guilty in May 2017 to accessory after the fact in a capital felony and abuse of a dead human body. He was facing up to 30 years in prison, but received an eight-year sentence in exchange for his plea. As part of his plea deal, Johnson had agreed to testify for the state against his sons, if needed, but prosecutors never called him to the witness stand.
Nathan Ybanez and Erik Jensen were sixteen years old when they murdered Nathan’s mother. According to court documents Nathan Ybanez was involved in an argument with his mother that ended violently with the teen killer beating her to death with a fire poker. It has been endlessly debated whether or not Erik Jensen showed up when the murder was taking place or after it was over. Jensen did help dispose of the body.
Both of the teen killers were convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Over the years both have appealed their sentences. Nathan Ybanez is up for parole in 2020 and Erik Jensen was released in 2020.
DOC Number:102794Est. Parole Eligibility Date:12/01/2020Next Parole Hearing Date:Sep 2020This offender is scheduled on the Parole Board agenda for the month and year above. Please contact the facility case manager for the exact date. Est. Mandatory Release Date:Est. Sentence Discharge Date:12/31/9998Current Facility Assignment:STERLING CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
Nathan Ybanez And Erik Jensen Other News
Erik was there when Nathan Ybanez killed his mother after years of abuse; Nate says Erik didn’t do anything, but they’re both serving life without parole for her death.
By the time 14-year-old Nathan Ybanez moved to Highlands Ranch, Colo., in 1996, his family had left a trail of over 30 different addresses. Nate, his strict evangelical Christian mother Julie and his father Roger bounced from Iowa to Germany to Virginia to Illinois, steered by Roger’s capricious career ambitions — insurance salesman, baker, golf pro — and the volatility of the couple’s marriage.
But moving to a new city never fixed the underlying tensions in the Ybanez family. “Both of my parents were unhappy, I think. My father, he was kind of a violent man at times. And my mother, she was unstable,” Nathan Ybanez told FRONTLINE. “It was hard to tell what kind of a mood she was going to be in and how she would react to things.”
He feared his father’s violent temper, but Nate told FRONTLINE that his relationship with his mother was the source of even greater suffering and confusion. Julie was extremely controlling of his behavior — she was known to tap his phone and follow him when he went out — and her emotional instability led to a warped and abusive relationship with her son. She would call Nathan Ybanez when he was out with friends, begging him to come home to comfort her, Nate recalled. “A lot of times she would bring that down to the level [of], you know, you don’t want to come home because you don’t love me, or stuff like that,” he told FRONTLINE.
When Roger was away, Julie’s neediness grew into sexual abuse. “A lot of times it would happen like this,” Nathan Ybanez told FRONTLINE. “She’s crying or something’s sad, so I don’t like to see her cry, so I ask her what’s wrong. I try to get her to talk about whatever it was that was making her sad, and a lot of times it would involve me coming and giving her hugs and staying in bed with her and letting her unload. And a few times that evolved into her doing sexual things to me that she shouldn’t have been doing.”
“I knew that it wasn’t right, but I wasn’t sure about my place in the whole area of what was going on with my family and the world in general. I’d been kept apart from a lot of outside things,” Nate added. “These kind of things [sexual abuse] make me feel like I wish I could cut off my own skin. That’s how I feel. Even today. So I don’t like talking about them.”
Nate had always had difficulty making friends. But working in a Highlands Ranch pizzeria, he met Brett Baker. Brett introduced him to Erik Jensen, and the pair invited Nate to become the new guitarist in their punk rock band, Troublebound.
Erik, the oldest child of a well-to-do venture capitalist, lived in a big house where Troublebound got together to practice. Nate became a regular at Erik’s house.
It was not long before and Erik and his parents began to suspect that Nate was having trouble at home. Erik told FRONTLINE that what Nate was experiencing wasn’t “normal teen angst, where he’s not happy that he didn’t get to go to the Homecoming game. He’s not happy that something really bad’s happening to him.”
Nate was reluctant to talk about his home situation with anyone. “With my close friends, they knew that I had a lot of problems in my family,” he told FRONTLINE, “but I tried to keep everything away from [them]. I didn’t like talking about any of this stuff because it’s embarrassing. I just wanted to be seen as a normal person.”
But Nate’s home situation made normal impossible. Erik and Brett, who were embarrassed to ask Nate about the problems they suspected, asked their parents to try to intervene. The parents were concerned enough to contact a social worker, but no caseworker was ever assigned to investigate. The Jensens say they were told social services didn’t have the resources to take care of after teenage boys who should be able to look out for themselves. The agency has denied that that is their policy. “I think he gave up on the system and he gave up on anybody else helping him besides himself,” Erik told FRONTLINE.
Nate began drinking heavily. “I was into doing some drugs that I shouldn’t have been doing. And I was drinking exceptionally a lot,” he told FRONTLINE. “For me it was like I felt like I had to drink, like it was the only way to maintain.”
On June 5th, 1996, Julie told Nate that she was sending him to a Christian boot camp in Missouri. Nate was terrified by this prospect. “It seemed to me that something had to happen — had to happen that day,” he told FRONTLINE.
That night, Erik, high on marijuana, picked Nate up after his shift at Einsten Bros. Bagels, and the pair drove to Nate’s place. Nate went up and told Erik to check on him if he wasn’t back in 20 minutes.
No one knows exactly what happened in the Ybanez’s apartment that night. When Nate hadn’t reappeared 20 minutes later, Erik went up to the apartment, and Julie let him in. Erik says he went to wait in Nate’s bedroom, but then began to hear the sounds of an argument — people “fighting to the death,” he later said on the stand — and came out when Nate called for him to bring some plastic wrap.
Erik walked into a bloody scene — Nate had beaten his mother over the head with a pair of fireplace tongs and was attempting to strangle her. Stoned and shocked by the gore, Erik says he doesn’t clearly know what happened next, but he thinks he collapsed onto the bloody carpet after Nate handed him the tongs.
Julie died from suffocation after Nate choked her with the tongs. Then the boys called Brett Baker to help clean up and help dispose of the evidence in dumpsters. They also threw away some of Julie’s things to make it seem like she and Nate had skipped town.
Looking back on that night, Erik told FRONTLINE, “I basically just went along with the flow, and I think Nate did, too. Once the floodgate came down — and all that stuff that happened to him all came out at once — he was just rolling along like I was.”
The next morning, a police officer on patrol spotted Nate in a public park, standing over his mother’s body. “I was kind of blank afterwards,” Nate told FRONTLINE about that time. “Not really relief, but just — I don’t know. … You’re just blank. You’re just existing.” Nate was charged as an adult with first-degree murder.
Erik and Brett were arrested a few days later, charged as accessories in the murder. Both were released on bail.
But nearly two months later, the police re-arrested Erik and charged him as an adult with first-degree murder, based on testimony Brett Baker agreed to give as part of a plea bargain. Brett told prosecutors that Erik knew in advance about the murder and had told him he hit Julie with the tongs three times.
In exchange for this testimony, the prosecution gave Brett total immunity from charges in the murder, shortened the sentence he was serving in a juvenile facility for earlier charges of harassment and reckless endangerment, and agreed not to revoke his probation stemming from other previous charges.
Erik went on trial first, in August 1999. After plea negotiations for second-degree murder fell through in the wake of the Columbine school shootings, Erik’s attorney argued that his client was too high to be cognizant of what was going on that night. The jury rejected Erik’s marijuana defense and convicted him of first-degree murder, which in Colorado carrie a mandatory sentence of life without parole at that time.
Nate’s trial, which commenced in October 1999 and was televised on Court TV, lasted less than three days. In many instances, juveniles charged with serious crimes are assigned a guardian ad litum, an independent legal advisor. But in Nate’s case, his father was allowed to advise him and pay for his counsel, despite a clear conflict of interest and allegations of abuse. The tension between father and son was made publicly evident by an audio tape played during a motion to throw out Nate’s confession, in which Roger is heard cursing him angrily before storming out of the room.
Nate’s attorney called no witnesses during the trial. He based his defense on the argument that Nate’s friends had corrupted him into thinking he was being abused and that Erik provided the spark that turned talk about killing Julie into a reality. In his closing arguments, Nate’s counsel acknowledged that Nate had killed his mother but asked jurors to find him guilty of second-degree murder. The jury convicted Nate of first-degree murder, carrying a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
Nate is currently planning to appeal his conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel.
Erik is currently preparing an appeal to the Colorado supreme court.
In prison, Nate has earned his GED and practices meditation. “I’m better in prison than I was when I was free,” Nate told FRONTLINE, comparing prison to his home life. He and Erik have also both developed their writing and visual art talents while serving time.
Erik has begun writing fantasy novels; his parents recently published the first in a trilogy he’s completing. He also started a Web site called the Next Day Foundation that counsels abused teens. His parents, who visit every week, formed the Pendulum Foundation to bring attention to juvenile justice issues.
Nate and Erik write each other occasionally. “We write each other about every six months,” Erik told FRONTLINE. “[Nate’s] really into physics and philosophy and stuff, so we trade back theories here and there and stuff. We don’t really talk about prison too much, because there’s not a whole lot to say. We do the same thing every day.”
Erik and Nate worry that they will not be able to survive forever in prison if all their avenues of appeal should fail. “Slowly and ceaselessly, this prison system is destroying those good, human qualities I still possess,” Nate wrote in an excerpt of his journal published by the Rocky Mountain News. “If the truly important parts of myself get taken, I hope I will have awareness enough to kill myself.”
Erik echoed this sentiment. “In ten years, I’ll either be on the streets or dead,” he told FRONTLINE. “It’s just not worth it to go on here. It’s like a mockery, really. It would make me feel like I’ve let myself down.”
Josiah Ivy was sixteen years old when he murdered two people. According to court documents Josiah and an accomplice picked out a random couple and followed them to their home. The two young men would knock on the door and Josiah would shoot the male homeowner. Josiah would chase the woman throughout the home and would fatally shoot her as well. This teen killer would be sentenced to life in prison without parole. Josiah was one of the participants on the documentary Lost For Life discussing teens sentenced to life without parole
DOC Number: 128744 Est. Parole Eligibility Date: 01/15/2082 Next Parole Hearing Date: Oct 2081 This offender is scheduled on the Parole Board agenda for the month and year above. Please contact the facility case manager for the exact date. Est. Mandatory Release Date: 01/15/2082 Est. Sentence Discharge Date: Current Facility Assignment: COLORADO TERRITORIAL CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
Josiah Ivy Other News
The teen involved in the 2002 slaying of a Crystola couple could face less time behind bars after a judge handed him a reduced sentence Tuesday.
Josiah Ivy, 33, was hoping for a shot at parole following a 2012 Supreme Court ruling, which found life sentences without parole for juveniles unconstitutional. Since 2005, Ivy has been serving two consecutive life sentences with no chance of release.
Tuesday, a judge resentenced him to 84 years in prison with parole eligibility.
Josiah was 16 years old when he participated in the murders of Gary Alflen, 47, and Stacy Dahl, 39, in November 2002. Prosecutors said he wanted to “see what it felt like” to kill.
Despite claiming insanity at the time of the killings, he was ruled competent to stand trial and swiftly found guilty by a jury.
His co-killer, Michael Paprocki is currently serving back-to-back life sentences. Paprocki, four years older than Ivy, was not a minor at the time of the murders and does not benefit from the Supreme Court decision.
Josiah Ivy More News
A 19-year-old accused of gunning down two people just to see how it felt to kill someone was sentenced to life in prison without parole after a jury convicted him of four counts of murder.
Josiah Ivy was sentenced Tuesday to two life terms plus 24 years for the November 2002 deaths of Gary Alflen, 47, and his wife, Stacy Dahl, 39.
“You wanted to know what it felt like to kill people,” District Judge Kirk Samelson told Ivy. “Now you’re going to know what it’s like to spend the rest of your life in prison.” Ivy was convicted of two counts of premeditated first-degree murder, two counts of felony murder and nine other counts. An accomplice, Michael Paprocki, was sentenced last November to two life terms without parole plus 40 years after he was convicted of murder and other counts.
Prosecutors said Ivy, then 16, and Paprocki, then 19, chose Alflen and Dahl at random and killed them to see what it would be like.
The teens went to the couple’s Crystola home and knocked on the door, and Ivy shot Alflen when he answered, Assistant District Attorney Amy Mullaney told jurors. Ivy then chased Dahl into the garage and beat and shot her, Mullaney said.
Ivy had pleaded innocent by reason of insanity. His attorney, Philip Dubois, said an appeal would be filed. Dubois maintained Paprocki shot both victims.
In the earlier trial, Paprocki’s attorney said Ivy killed both victims.
A state court judge has resentenced Josiah Ivy to 84 years in prison.
He had been serving two life sentences in the 2002 murders of Gary Alflen and Stacy Dahl in Crystola.
The resentencing was required after the US Supreme Court ruled that such sentences for juveniles amount to cruel and unusual punishment even if it involves murder or other capital crimes.
Ivy was 16 at the time he committed the crimes, so after accounting for time served, he is now looking at basically 70 more years in prison, plus 15 years probation.
Josiah Ivy is currently incarcerated at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility
Josiah Ivy Release Date
Josiah Ivy is serving a life sentence and his first opportunity for release in 2081
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