A man and woman were convicted Thursday in the love triangle-fueled murder of a beloved Philadelphia teacher last April in front of her 11-year-old son.
A jury deliberated less than an hour after a trial that started Monday to find Zakkee Steven Alhakim, 34, and Julie Jean, 35, guilty of first-degree murder for the cold-blooded killing of Rachel King on April 11, local NBC affiliate WCAU reported.
King, 35, was sitting in her Ford Edge that morning in the Dunkin’ drive-thru in Cheltenham Township, Penn., with her son, Jalen, in the backseat. They had stopped for a treat on the way to his violin lesson.
A silver Mercury Sable drove up behind them, parking a short distance away from the drive-thru lane. A man got out, walked up to the driver’s side of King’s vehicle, whipped out a gun and shot her multiple times, without saying a word, investigators told WCAU. Then he jumped back into the sedan and sped off, leaving the boy physically uninjured but traumatized.
King taught at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in the Tioga-Nicetown section of Philadelphia and dreamed of becoming a principal, WCAU reported. By all accounts, her students adored her.
The ensuing investigation into her murder revealed a myriad of connections between King and the convicted killers. Jean had been jealous of King, the longtime girlfriend of William Hayes. Hayes and Jean had an affair the previous year, but Hayes had broken it off and reconciled with King, investigators said at the time.
“Jean continued to text, call and harass both King and Hayes,” the Montgomery County District Attorney said when Jean and Alhakim were arrested last year. It got so bad that Hayes obtained a Protection From Abuse Order against Jean.
Alhakim, for his part, was the cousin of the father of Jean’s three children, police learned, which is how the two co-conspirators met in early 2023.
Together they spent two months planning King’s murder, surveillance video and other evidence showed. Prosecutors said Jean paid Alhakim to commit the crime, WPVI reported.
“This cold-blooded killing of Rachel King was a targeted murder of an innocent person, planned by these two defendants and horrifically carried out in front of King’s son,” Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele said last year. “It is a tragic killing of a good person, all because of an ended affair.”
