MARTINEZ — A 41-year-old Oakland man was sentenced last year to life without the possibility of parole for killing his ex-girlfriend and her mother hours after he received breakup emails that mocked him, court records show.
Dontay Williams waited outside the Antioch home of 28-year-old Milan Ardoin and 55-year-old Valinda Rose Scott in the early morning of July 5, 2018, knowing that the mother and daughter commuted to work in San Francisco together every day. When Ardoin appeared, he shot her in the chest, chased her down, placed his gun in her mouth, and fired a second time, before turning the gun on her mother, according to a probation report detailing the crime.
Williams was convicted of both murder counts in 2023. He was sentenced last June to life without parole, an outcome that hasn’t been previously reported. He is currently being housed in Pelican Bay State Prison, records show.
A probation report that sheds new light on the case says that Ardoin and Williams had a rocky relationship that lasted years, but that Ardoin had tried again and again to break things off. Williams was saved in her phone contact list as “Move On Never Gone (sic) Change,” the report says.
Hours before Williams killed Ardoin and Scott, Ardoin sent him emails telling him to leave her alone. One of them implied that Williams wasn’t very well-endowed and asked him to set her up with a friend who was, the report says.
“You mine,” Williams allegedly responded, before sending off one more chilling message before the double murder. It read: “You just f—-d up.”
The double murder occurred hours after that message exchange. Williams drove to the victims’ residence on the 4400 block of Delta Fair Boulevard in Antioch and waited, according to prosecutors.
Ardoin was in the early stages of pregnancy, but Williams may not have known it. A portion of the probation report — which was contested by Williams’ lawyer — says that Ardoin told Williams she’d had an abortion because she didn’t want to have the “devil’s seed.” She also turned down his marriage proposal because he was “dangerous,” a portion of the report says.
Williams was arrested three days after the homicide and has been in jail ever since. Unless the verdict is overturned on appeal, he has no legal recourse to ever leave prison.
Williams’ lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Tim Ahearn, argued against a sentence of life without parole, calling it “cruel and unusual” and stating that Williams became a “victim of childhood trauma” at 15, when his brother was killed.
The defense motion says that Williams was a “hard-working man” and “productive person” in society after spending a few years in prison during his early 20s, and that he wouldn’t pose a danger to the public if released from prison someday.
“There is no history in the court’s record before it, that Mr. Williams was a violent and dangerous individual before the events of July 5, 2018,” Ahearn wrote.
Ardoin was a UCLA graduate and pursuing a doctorate when she was killed. She left behind a 4-year-old son. Scott was the youngest of nine children, a tight-knit family that helped her as she raised Ardoin while holding down a job.
“It’s like a dream. It doesn’t seem real,” Faye Colvin, older sister to Rose Scott and aunt to Milan Ardoin, told this newspaper in 2018. “When I heard, I was praying so hard for one (of the victims) to make it and asked God to please spare one.”