Couple sentenced for murder of Oregon man lured to hotel from Tacoma strip club
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Couple lured Tacoma visitor from strip club to motel, executed robbery plot.
- Jury convicted both of first-degree murder and burglary; sentences exceed 30 years.
- DNA, hotel video and receipt evidence linked suspects; police arrested them in 2024.
Two people convicted of first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of an Oregon man lured to a Tacoma hotel room to be mugged under the premise of a paid hookup have been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison each.
Hector Gonzalez-Jimenez, 27, was enjoying a weekend trip to Tacoma with his friends in late August 2024 when he met a dancer using the name Armani at a strip club on Pacific Avenue. They arranged to meet later that night, and the dancer, whose real name was Ashley Danielle Arrieta, was paid $1,500 after she entered her customer’s fifth-floor room.
Arrieta wasn’t alone. Waiting downstairs was her boyfriend, Jamari Khayelle Webb. According to Pierce County prosecutors, the couple had plotted to rob Gonzalez-Jimenez and burglarize his motel room while armed with a gun. After Arrieta was paid, she messaged Webb and then let him into the room while she slipped out.
Webb forced Gonzalez-Jimenez to rummage through his backpack at gunpoint for cash, according to court documents, and the stickup turned violent when Gonzalez-Jimenez reached for his gun to defend himself. Webb beat him, then shot and killed the man.
Superior Court Judge Stanley Rumbaugh sentenced Webb to 36 years, 8 months in prison on Nov. 21. He imposed a term of 31 years, nine months for Arrieta on the same day.
Clues at hotel room helped police ID assailants
DNA, hotel surveillance video and a Safeway receipt helped police determine Webb, 25, and Arietta, 27, were responsible. According to court documents, Gonzalez-Jimenez was found dead by hotel staff after he failed to check out. A 911 call reported it as a possible suicide, but according to prosecutors, police quickly realized he had been murdered.
Surveillance video captured Webb and Arrieta walking through the lobby separately, with Webb wearing only one white shoe. Police found a white slip-on shoe outside the hotel room, and testing found DNA belonging to both the victim and Webb. Arrieta walked through the lobby carrying a grocery bag, which was recovered inside the room along with a receipt for a $28 bottle of tequila. It was purchased Aug. 24, 2024, the evening before the early-morning murder.
The receipt led Tacoma police to obtain surveillance video from Safeway, which showed a man and a woman walking into the store hand-in-hand, wearing the same clothes as the people seen walking through the hotel lobby. A police bulletin of the suspects was disseminated to law enforcement agencies, and a Federal Way detective recognized the woman as Arrieta.
Police surveilled her home and saw a man taking her daughters to school, according to prosecutors’ trial brief. He wore a Chicago Bulls baseball cap similar to the one worn by the man walking with Arrieta at Safeway. On Sept. 17, 2024, police arrested the couple after following them to a park in King County.
Ahead of a jury trial in October, Webb asserted that his defense would be excusable homicide and justifiable homicide in the alternative, while reserving other defenses. According to prosecutors’ trial brief, Arrieta asserted that she had no reasonable grounds to believe Webb was armed with a firearm when he entered the hotel room.
On Nov. 4, jurors convicted Webb and Arrieta of all counts, finding them each guilty of first-degree murder and first-degree burglary, which both carried firearm-sentencing enhancements. Webb was additionally found guilty of first-degree unlawful possession of a firearm.
Defendants discussed wedding, honeymoon after murder
Prior to a sentencing hearing Nov. 21, prosecutors told Superior Court Judge Stanley Rumbaugh that Webb and Arrieta deserved no leniency from the court because of their actions after the murder. After leaving Gonzalez-Jimenez for dead, prosecutors said they fled with his cell phone and threw it out a window, then got rid of their clothes and the gun Webb used.
“Then they moved on, as if taking a life was just a momentary glitch they needed to overcome,” deputy prosecuting attorney Sunni Ko wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “They planned their wedding, discussed whether they should honeymoon in Cancun or Hawaii and ruminated about perhaps moving to the south where they could still purchase a house for 15 to 20 thousand dollars.”
Webb’s attorney from the Department of Assigned Counsel, Eric Trujillo, requested a 25-year, 10-month prison term in a sentencing memo, arguing that the murder and burglary convictions should be merged, stating that the case was a single set of circumstances that created both offenses. According to court records, whether to merge them was up to the court’s discretion, and Rumbaugh elected not to do so, which lengthened both defendants’ punishments.
Arrieta’s attorney from the Public Defense Conflict Office, James Dahl, asked the court to impose a term of 26 years, nine months and made similar arguments in a sentencing memo about merging the offenses. Dahl said Arrieta wholeheartedly regretted the incident and had no intention for Gonzalez-Jimenez to be shot.
