With a fleeting goodbye hug, Rachelle Amato and Lisa Baldridge bridged an impossible divide in a Multnomah County courtroom Friday.
It had been three years since Amato’s son, Dominic Jacoby, had been shot dead just a few steps from his mom’s townhouse before dawn on Aug. 21, 2021.
The killer was Lisa’s son — Alec Baldridge — who was sentenced to life in prison for a second-degree murder that prosecutors said was motivated not by drugs or mental illness, but greed.
“Mr. Baldridge made a conscious and cold-blooded decision to kill Mr. Jacoby that night,” Senior Deputy District Attorney Todd Jackson said in court.
Fresh from an eye operation, Alec Baldridge, now 26, wore reflective glasses that masked all emotion as he sat still and silent during the sentencing hearing, turning his head only once to watch a slideshow of photos of the former friend he killed over a $35,000 drug debt.
He plans to appeal his sentence, but if unsuccessful will be eligible for parole in 25 years.
During Alec Baldridge’s trial in June, witnesses and cell phone records showed that Jacoby, 21, had given Baldridge black-market marijuana on the expectation of payment later. Rather than settle the debt, Baldridge decided to kill Jacoby, first attempting to bring on an accomplice to the murder plot and then, when rebuffed, carrying it out alone.
Surveillance videos showed him circling the Gresham townhouse where his friend lived, texting him to come outside and then turning off his cell phone.
“It was not a trail of breadcrumbs but rather bread loaves leading the police back to Mr. Baldridge,” remarked Circuit Judge Heidi Moawad.
During the trial, prosecutors presented jail calls as evidence to show Baldridge had coordinated with other inmates and people on the outside to intimidate the witness who recovered the murder weapon from testifying.
Alex Baldridge and Dominic Jacoby had met while both were employed by Baldridge’s father at a landscaping business, according to a memo written by his defense attorney.
The memo said Baldridge’s parents raised their son in a lifestyle rife with drugs and crime, leading Baldridge to move in with his grandmother to escape foster care.
Lisa Baldridge, her head bare from treatments for pancreatic cancer that the defense memo said is terminal, wept during the hearing.
Jacoby’s mother, Amato, was flanked by more than a dozen family members wearing blue t-shirts printed with Jacoby’s photo and his jersey number on the Barlow High basketball team.
Amato said her son wasn’t perfect, but said he had a good heart and a kindly nature. Photos displayed in court showed him passing through teenage rites of passage: posing with a sweetheart at a school dance, in his football uniform and smiling with friends.
On the night of the murder, when Amato heard the sound of six gunshots ring out just feet from her home, she rushed outside and peered into the blackness. The mother of three had no way of knowing her son was only steps away, breathing his last.
Amato shut the door.
“He was all alone, and the thought will haunt me forever,” she said in court. “We have been given the true life sentence.”
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