Prosecutors said home surveillance video captured a six-hour attack on Christopher Hahn, a friend Jeremy Allen had known since high school.

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — A Suffolk County judge sentenced Jeremy Allen to life in prison without parole on Feb. 26 after jurors found that the East Quogue man beat, suffocated and stabbed his longtime friend Christopher Hahn to death during a six-hour attack at Allen’s home.

The sentence closed the trial stage in one of Suffolk County’s most brutal recent homicide cases. Prosecutors said Allen, 44, tortured Hahn, 43, after the two spent part of Sept. 27, 2024, together drinking before returning to Allen’s house. The case drew unusual attention because authorities said exterior surveillance cameras at the home recorded key parts of the assault, giving jurors a detailed timeline of what happened and helping support a first-degree murder conviction that carries life without parole in New York.

Trial evidence showed that Allen and Hahn had been friends since high school and were together the night of Sept. 27, 2024, before heading back to Allen’s East Quogue home. Prosecutors said the violence started a few minutes after midnight. According to the evidence, Allen beat Hahn for about 18 minutes while sounds of the attack were captured on exterior surveillance video. Video then showed Allen dragging a bruised and semi-conscious Hahn onto the rear deck. Hahn was badly hurt and could not stand, prosecutors said. Later, Allen returned to the deck and struck him again with a baseball bat. District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney said the evidence showed Allen then placed a plastic bag over Hahn’s head, tied it loosely and sat in a lawn chair a few feet away while Hahn struggled to breathe for about eight minutes. Prosecutors said Allen later got a large knife from inside the house and stabbed Hahn 10 times in the neck.

By the time of sentencing, the facts of the killing were no longer in dispute before the court. A jury had convicted Allen on Jan. 21, 2026, of first-degree murder and tampering with physical evidence after a trial before state Supreme Court Justice Timothy P. Mazzei. Prosecutors said the torture lasted about six hours from the first beating until Hahn died. They said Allen stood over Hahn as he took his last breaths. They also said Allen tried to clean blood from the home and rear deck, then called a handyman to help clean the scene. When the worker arrived, prosecutors said, he saw blood throughout the home and Hahn’s body under a blanket on the deck. Allen told him he could not leave after seeing what was there, according to the prosecution. The handyman persuaded Allen to let him go, fled and called police. Officers then arrested Allen at the home.

The case also carried a painful personal history that surfaced in public reporting and in court. Hahn and Allen were described as friends since their high school years. Reporting on the case said the two men had recently fallen out over money connected to a boat deal and had arranged to meet to settle the disagreement. Prosecutors said they spent time at a bar before returning home together. Other local reporting said they had also planned to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting but instead ended up drinking that night. Those details helped frame the killing not as a random act between strangers but as a sudden and extreme act against someone the defendant had known for decades. At sentencing, family and friends spoke less about punishment than about the life that was lost. They described Hahn as loyal, bright and adventurous, and said the harm from his death could not be measured by the sentence alone.

In New York, a first-degree murder conviction in a torture killing can bring the state’s most severe non-capital punishment, and that shaped the legal path of the case from verdict to sentencing. Prosecutors charged Allen not only with murder but also with tampering with physical evidence, pointing to the cleanup attempt after Hahn’s death. Assistant District Attorney Elena Tomaro and Assistant District Attorney Stuart Levy handled the prosecution, and Suffolk County police homicide detectives Michael Ronca and Matt Sagistano were identified as lead investigators. Allen was represented by attorney Colin Astarita. At sentencing, public reporting said Allen apologized and claimed he was bipolar, telling the court he could not figure out what he had done. The record available in the public reporting does not show any successful mental disease defense at trial, and nothing in the verdict changed the mandatory outcome once the first-degree murder count stood.

The hearing also became a public account of who Hahn had been outside the crime scene photographs and surveillance images. News 12 reported that friend Blake Cornell said Hahn loved travel and carried a rare kind of light. Law and Crime reported that Hahn’s mother cursed Allen in court and told him to rot in hell, then spoke of her son’s ability to get back on his feet no matter how hard life became. Those remarks gave the proceeding a human focus after weeks of attention on the mechanics of the killing. The prosecution, meanwhile, framed the sentence as the only fitting result for what Tierney called torture carried out against a person who had once trusted Allen. The courtroom contrast was sharp: one side describing an irreplaceable friend, the other facing a permanent sentence built on video, witness testimony and the defendant’s conduct after the killing.

Allen has been sentenced to life without parole and remains in custody. The next public milestone would likely be any notice of appeal filed in New York’s appellate courts, though no date for that step was listed in the reports reviewed.

Author note: Last updated March 25, 2026.