‘Truly sorry.’ Sumner man serving life for role in murder-for-hire plot will soon be free

Jason Allison was 19 years old when he was sentenced to life in prison for helping kill a Sumner activist in the Filipino community as part of a murder-for-hire scheme plotted by the victim’s daughter.

After more than three decades of incarceration, Allison, now 49, was resentenced Tuesday based on recent rulings from the Washington State Supreme Court, and he will soon be free.

Just how soon Allison will be released wasn’t clear to Timothy Ashcraft, the Pierce County Superior Court judge who imposed the new sentence, or the defendant’s attorney, Chandra Carlisle. But Carlisle said after court adjourned that she believed Allison’s earned release time for good behavior in the Department of Corrections would allow him to be released much sooner than the 32 months he officially has left to serve.

Ashcraft gave Allison 400 months in prison for the March 15, 1994, murder of 59-year-old Marietta Dela Cruz. The judge said Allison had done very well while incarcerated, noting he earned his GED before resentencing was a possibility in his case, and he had not received an infraction in 20 years.

“I think I can say that he’s probably done about as well as could be expected while incarcerated, and that’s no small feat,” Ashcraft said.

Allison was one of four people convicted in the killing, which was set up by Dela Cruz’s only daughter, Filomena Washington. The daughter had a difficult relationship with her mother, had reportedly fallen deep into debt and believed she might inherit as much as $1.4 million after Dela Cruz’s death through insurance money as the heir to her estate.

Washington promised to pay Allison, then 18, and Dokdinh Sayasack, then 21, for killing her mother, according to court records. The two recruited Randy Philip Capps, 20, to help. At the time of their arrests, two months after Dela Cruz was shot twice in her home on Chestnut Street, Sheriff’s Department investigators said the co-conspirators were promised between $25,000 and $50,000 each.

Sayasack drove Allison and Capps to Dela Cruz’s home, and there are different accounts as to whether Allison or Capps fired the fatal shots. Investigators said the two tried to disguise the murder-for-profit plot as a burglary gone wrong while Washington was in Louisiana with her husband, but neighbors heard the attackers talking about the conspiracy and gave the information to law enforcement.

‘There’s a debt that I can never repay.’

Deputy prosecuting attorney Brittany North argued Tuesday for a new sentence of 420 months, and Carlisle requested a sentence of time served, 368 months. North told the court her longer recommendation was partly based on comparing it to other recent resentencing hearings, including that of Dwayne Satterfield, but the prosecutor was also impressed by Allison’s relatively clean prison record and the depth of his plans for reentering society.

“He has labored in prison. He kept his head down. He has worked tirelessly,” North said.

When Allison took part in the murder, North said he didn’t have housing and was looking for a quick way to make money, and he chose to do that by taking another person’s life. The prosecutor said it was the wrong thing to do, but through his years of incarceration Allison’s problem-solving and thinking have drastically changed.

Allison’s aunt, Linda Pendergrass, addressed the court during the hearing along with one other speaker. She said she’s kept in contact with Allison over the years, and she’s seen how he’s matured. He’s tried to educate himself by taking classes and studying textbooks Pendergrass has sent him.

“He was a teenager when he entered Walla Walla, one of the scariest places, I think, on Earth,” Pendergrass said. “And he took that and he has grown and tried to be a better person, not a worse person.”

The second speaker was Marcus Price, a re-entry manager with the Seattle Clemency Project who was corresponding with Allison about his potential release. He said Allison would have the services of his organization for three years, helping connect him to housing, employment, transportation and mental health services.

Price said Allison would live in the SeaTac area in clean-and-sober housing, and he would develop culinary skills through the FareStart program, which is based in Seattle. Carlisle later said Allison has worked in prison kitchens since at least 1999, and he wanted to continue to work in kitchens if released.

Allison sat in court throughout the hearing in a gray jail uniform from the county jail, where he’d been held in custody ahead of the court date since Oct. 15. When it was his turn to speak, he quickly became emotional.

“I’d just like to say that I’m truly sorry,” Allison said.

Through tears, Allison said Dela Cruz was a loving and kind individual, and he was deeply ashamed and sorry for what he’d done.

“I know that there’s a debt that I can never pay, but I’d like to dedicate my life to trying to fulfill that,” he added.

Similarly-situated defendants seek resentencing

Allison, Sayasack and Filomena were convicted in jury trials of aggravated first-degree murder in 1995, and Capps pleaded guilty to the same charge. That meant all of them were guaranteed punishments of either life in prison without possibility of parole or execution. Former Pierce County Prosecutor John Ladenburg declined to pursue the death penalty due to the defendants’ ages and minimal criminal history.

Young people who were sentenced to life in prison without parole for crimes they committed when they were age 20 or younger are now beginning to receive new sentences.

That’s because in 2021 the state Supreme Court ruled that life imprisonment for young offenders is unconstitutional. And in May the high court issued a decision in State v. Carter, finding that sentencing courts have the option to give people aged 18-20 who were convicted of aggravated murder a sentence with a set length of time.

North said in court Tuesday that Pierce County has more similarly situated cases than any other county. Court records in Kurtis Monschke’s case, which the 2021 state Supreme Court ruling was named for, shows 13 so-called Monschke cases in the county out of a total 43 in the state.

Allison’s codefendants have also sought new sentences. Capps, of Gig Harbor, was also scheduled to be resentenced Tuesday, but a spokesperson for the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said it was canceled because his defense counsel was not done with a related evaluation.

Sayasack has similarly appealed his sentence, but he turned 21 just days before the murder, so he and Washington, who was 25, can’t be resentenced.

Information from The News Tribune’s archives contributed to this report.