Three years later, the husband who sent them pleaded guilty and received a 20-year prison sentence.
BEAVERTON, Ore. — The Beaverton homicide case that ended this spring with a 20-year prison sentence was defined from the start by frantic messages to 911, as Talon Gabriel Mitchell told dispatchers he was “stuck in a dream” after his wife, Oulaykham Mona Chopheng, had been fatally shot inside their apartment.
Those texts became the thread that tied together the public story of the case: a young couple married only weeks, neighbors hearing distress through the walls, police spending precious minutes at the door, and prosecutors eventually resolving the case with a plea instead of a trial. On March 10, Mitchell admitted guilt to first-degree manslaughter with a firearm and unlawful use of a weapon in Washington County Circuit Court, closing a prosecution that began with murder charges after Chopheng’s 2023 death.
According to records reviewed by local news outlets, Mitchell sent a series of all-caps messages around 10:15 p.m., saying he needed help, was trapped in a dream and was being controlled. Officers had already been dispatched to the apartment complex on Southwest 160th Avenue after a neighbor reported a woman crying out for help. When police arrived, the scene did not immediately open up to them. Officers spent about a half hour trying to persuade Mitchell to open the door, according to an affidavit later described in court coverage. When they finally got inside, they found Chopheng, 24, dead from a shotgun blast to the face, her body on a couch. Mitchell, then 19, was detained and later arrested. The first public police release, issued days later, described the case as a murder investigation and said detectives had booked him on second-degree murder and unlawful use of a weapon charges.
Mitchell’s own later statements added to the surreal record but did not erase the core accusation. Investigators learned he had taken LSD before the shooting, and he later said he blacked out and did not remember firing the weapon. One account said he woke near the front door, saw Chopheng bloodied on the couch and thought he was in a nightmare or a zombie apocalypse before texting 911. Police and prosecutors did not publicly adopt that language as an explanation for the killing. Instead, they treated the texts, the physical evidence in the apartment and neighbor accounts as pieces of a homicide case. Public reporting said the tops of Mitchell’s shoes had blood on them. No public record released in the news reports identified another suspect, and authorities said detectives collected evidence supporting that Mitchell shot Chopheng earlier that evening.
The neighbors’ description of the hours before police entered gave the case its clearest human timeline. People living below the couple told police they heard sobbing from a woman and a man’s short, abrupt speech, along with noise that sounded like furniture moving. Then the apartment went quiet. The report suggested an escalating private crisis inside a third-floor unit before anyone outside could intervene. It also stood in sharp contrast to the messages Mitchell later sent, which read more like fragments than a narrative. That combination of panic texts and witness observations helped shape the public understanding of the case long before sentencing. The image that remained was not of a sudden, unexplained discovery but of a disturbance heard by others, followed by a delayed police entry and a grim scene inside.
When the case finally reached resolution, the courtroom record became far more concise than the investigative file that fed it. Mitchell pleaded guilty on March 10, 2026, to first-degree manslaughter with a firearm and unlawful use of a weapon. Judge Theodore Sims sentenced him to 240 months in prison on the manslaughter count and imposed a concurrent 16-month term on the weapon charge. Police said there was no post-prison supervision. Local reports said the sentence structure requires the first 10 years to be served in full, while the second half can be reduced for good behavior. The plea wiped a March 31 trial date off the calendar and ended the need for sworn witness testimony about the 911 texts, the LSD use and the final hour inside the apartment. It also left some questions unanswered in public, including whether prosecutors weighed intoxication issues, evidentiary disputes or trial risk when they accepted the deal.
Police described the result as justice for Chopheng and her family. Their statement after sentencing thanked patrol officers, detectives and prosecutors for the coordinated work that carried the case from late-night response to final judgment. Even so, the story remained marked by the same contrast that surfaced on the first night: fragmented pleas from the suspect on one side, and the permanent, silent fact of Chopheng’s death on the other. She was 24. The couple had been married only a short time. What began as a welfare check became a homicide case, then a plea, and finally a prison sentence measured in decades.
As of now, the criminal case is no longer headed toward trial. Mitchell has begun serving the sentence imposed on March 10, and the next formal milestone would most likely come only if later prison or appellate records are filed.
Author note: Last updated April 8, 2026.