SEATTLE (AP) — Gov. Chris Gregoire will allow the parole of a man who has served seven years of a 10-year prison sentence for a cold case murder conviction.
Gregoire told KING there’s no evidence of a mistake in the decision of the state Indeterminate Sentence Review Board to release John Nicholas Athan as early as Monday.
The 43-year-old was convicted in 2004 of second-degree murder in the 1982 killing of Kristen Sumstad when he was 14 and she was a 13-year-old neighbor in Seattle. The case went unsolved for two decades until police got a DNA sample from Athan by tricking him into licking an envelope.
The parole board says Athan is unlikely to reoffend. The early release is opposed by Sumstad’s family.
