A Maine man who used to play football at West Virginia University and in Europe will spend the next 58 years behind bars for murdering a 19-year-old former classmate.
Jalique Keene, a stand-out running back, was sentenced Wednesday by a judge in Bar Harbor.
He had been convicted in May of killing Mikaela Conley — whom he went to high school with — just after returning home from Europe in 2018. Her body was found that June by a state police K-9 unit.
Keene, 22, told jurors that he couldn’t remember what happened that day, even though he admitted in court to being caught on surveillance tape carrying Conley’s dead body. The young man claimed that a fight broke out between him and Conley after the two of them had consensual sex. He allegedly raped, beat and strangled the fellow Mount Desert High School alum and then ditched her body on a local road.
Prosecutors had been seeking a life sentence for Conley’s murder. Keene was sentenced to 58 years for the slaying and 30 years for the rape. The prison terms will be served concurrently.