Harger: A Spokane jury said 46 years. Washington’s clemency board just decided 30 was close enough. Now it’s on Ferguson’s desk.

Barbara Gongyin logged into the Zoom hearing from her bedroom.

The same bedroom where her husband, Christopher, was shot in the head 29 years ago. Where she was holding their 13-month-old daughter when it happened. Where the bullet burned the baby’s leg. She never left that house. She raised her children there. And on Dec. 12, 2025, she sat in that room and testified to the Washington State Clemency and Pardons Board about why the man who killed her husband should not go free.

She told them where she was calling from.

The board voted 2-to 1 to deny his release. While the family was on the video call with them, the answer was no.

Three months later, with no victims on the call and no new testimony, one board member changed her mind. The answer became yes.

The Gongyin family learned the result the same way everyone else did.

What happened in June of 1996

Christopher Gongyin was 20 years old. Two men broke into his Spokane home. An argument started. Travis ComesLast shot him in the head. The bullet burned their baby daughter’s leg. Then he turned to Barbara, pulled her and the baby out of bed, and demanded money and drugs.

Christopher Gongyin died in his own bedroom in front of his family.

ComesLast is now 50 years old. He’s served about 30 years of a 46-year sentence. He had a criminal record before the Spokane murder. Last week, the Washington State Clemency and Pardons Board’s 3-to-1 recommendation to release him landed on Washington Governor Bob Ferguson’s desk.

The Spokane County prosecutor opposed the release. Barbara opposed it. Their daughter, now in her 30s, opposed it. A family friend opposed it. Some family members submitted letters anonymously because, in their words, they “do not trust Travis or his family to not retaliate.” In 1996, ComesLast told The Spokesman-Review he was a former gang member. His brother Kenneth was sentenced to consecutive life terms for a double murder, the same week Travis killed Christopher Gongyin. Two sons. Two murder convictions.

Who Travis ComesLast was that night

Travis ComesLast was 20 years old in 1996. He was on the run from juvenile detention. He and an accomplice named Irvin Fentroy III were looking for money so they could skip town.

Here is what The Spokesman-Review reported on June 30, 1996. ComesLast had been arrested in 1994 for firing 15 rounds from a semiautomatic assault rifle into an apartment complex. A month before that arrest, he had escaped from a Wenatchee jail where he was serving time for robbery. On the night of the Gongyin murder, after the shooting, he and Fentroy were pulled over in a traffic stop. Fentroy was arrested. ComesLast bolted from the car on foot. Police described him as probably armed and “very dangerous.” The paper also noted that while ComesLast was being sought for the Gongyin murder, his 16-year-old brother Kenneth had just been sentenced to consecutive life terms for shooting two teenage girls to death the year before.

The Spokesman-Review described the killing of Christopher Gongyin as “execution-style.” An autopsy confirmed he died from a single gunshot wound to the back of the head.

ComesLast describes what happened as a “drug deal gone bad.” His account of the shooting: “I went to go hit him on the head with the gun to stop him, and I missed his head and when I came to the point where his head would have been to hit, my hand tightened up and I shot him.”

ComesLast was sentenced to 46 years for murder and robbery. His attorneys at the clemency hearing argued that 17 years of that sentence came from juvenile criminal history, under a Washington law that required courts to factor in juvenile offenses when calculating adult sentences. The board found that argument persuasive.

The question of whether juvenile sentencing points were applied fairly is a legitimate legal argument. The question of whether Christopher Gongyin’s family should absorb the cost of resolving it is a different one.

Barbara Gongyin told the board: “It is unfair, painful, and disappointing that it has become my responsibility to plead that a just sentence be maintained.”

On Dec. 12, 2025, the board agreed. Then it reconvened on March 12, 2026, and it didn’t.

What the daughter told them on Dec. 12

Christopher’s daughter has never heard her father introduce her. Never heard anyone call her “his daughter.” She told the board what that means in practice.

“I spent the day in school counseling when other students made crafts for their dads.”

“‘Girl dad’ is a thing now. And they put that on clothing. They put it everywhere. I wish I could have seen what my dad being a ‘girl dad’ to me would be like.”

When a board member told her that ComesLast said everything he does now is “to honor Chris,” she responded:

“I think that makes me sick. I don’t think you should do everything to honor my dad. I only hear my dad’s name in relation to being murdered. And I do not want you to use it in any honoring.”

She also said she will not put herself through another hearing if ComesLast applies again.

“As of right now, I can say I won’t be putting myself through another one of these. It doesn’t mean I will have forgiven. I simply will be choosing not to give any more energy to this. And so, you can reference this hearing next time.”

She is not giving up. She is running out of what it costs to show up.

What the prosecutor said

Spokane County prosecutor Preston McCollum told the board what good behavior in a controlled setting is actually worth:

“You’re in a controlled setting. You’re in confinement. And you’re doing exactly what you should do. That’s what we, as a society, should expect of someone who’s been found guilty and convicted and is in custody.”

On what these hearings do to the people who loved Christopher Gongyin:

“The mere fact that we’re having a crime victim consider what the parameters of interacting with her husband’s killer are is, again, a retraumatization.”

“Once we get to a conviction, it’s like a ticking time bomb. It’s only a matter of time before some other person in some other setting reconsiders the life of their loved one.”

“Give this family a modicum of peace, of finality. Because finality is not something that crime victims, especially in the State of Washington, ever get.”

What the murder left behind

Barbara Gongyin had epilepsy as an infant. It went away. After Christopher was murdered, her seizures came back and never stopped. Her daughter testified: “She has seizures constantly now, and she wasn’t having them before the murder.”

ComesLast’s family still lives in the same tribal community. At powwows, they camp across from Barbara. Last summer, his stepfather and sister walked up to a yard sale at her home, realized where they were, and kept walking. His family’s position, Barbara testified, has always been “that it’s our fault, that their son and brother is and remains in prison.”

She was asked directly whether anything ComesLast could say or do would change her mind.

“Nothing he could do.”

She was asked whether the current sentence was enough.

“My opinion is not going to change. Taking my daughter’s father and my husband’s life at the time, I felt like a lifetime for him in prison would have been more just.”

How Washington’s clemency board reversed itself in March 2026

On Dec. 12, 2025, Acting Chair Rhonda Salveson made the motion to deny. Board Member Kazu Joshua seconded it. The vote was 2 to 1 to deny clemency. Board Member Aline Flower was the lone dissent. The board noted that Vice Chair Doug Baldwin, who had been absent, would need to review the hearing and cast his vote to satisfy the four-member requirement.

On March 12, 2026, the board reconvened. No new testimony. No new evidence. The Gongyin family was not on the call.

Before Baldwin cast his vote, Salveson announced she was changing hers. After “very deep and further reflection over the past three months,” she said, she now believed ComesLast had shown “remarkable change” and that his continued incarceration “no longer serves the interest of justice.”

The motion she herself had made on Dec. 12 now failed 1 to 3. Only Joshua held his vote.

Flower then moved to recommend commutation. She acknowledged the Gongyin family’s pain, then said the only remaining justification for keeping ComesLast incarcerated was “retribution,” which she found insufficient. Baldwin seconded. The final vote was 3 to 1.

The family wasn’t on the call. They weren’t notified. They found out after.

Washington’s Clemency and Pardons Board has a pattern

This isn’t the only case where the Washington State Clemency and Pardons Board has reached past the people sitting across from them.

David John Lennon was serving life without parole. He and an accomplice picked up a hitchhiker, held him for hours, shot him multiple times, and dumped his body along I-82 in Eastern Washington. The victim’s daughter was six years old when it happened. She showed up decades later to tell the Clemency Board how that loss shaped her entire life. The board recommended commutation anyway. She said she felt devastated and betrayed. Ferguson denied it.

William Floyd Kincaid was serving life without parole. June 14, 1982, in Toppenish. He found out his wife wanted to leave him and take their son. He walked back to his truck, loaded a 12-gauge magnum shotgun with five shells, came back into the house, and shot his sister-in-law, Debra Kruse, in the neck and jaw. Then he kicked in the bathroom door. His wife Charla had locked herself in and was crouched behind the toilet. He shot her in the back of the head. Children were in the house. He then tried to shoot himself and blew off part of his own jaw.

The Yakima County prosecutor called it “absolutely a grisly homicide” and argued Kincaid should die in prison. The victims’ brother wrote to the board: “This man should never be let out in the world. What he did was tear the heart out of a whole family.” A sister of the victims said the killing sent another family member into a spiral she never recovered from.

The Clemency Board tied 2-2 and referred the decision to outgoing Gov. Jay Inslee. Inslee let him go on his way out the door on Jan. 13, 2025, one week before leaving office. The clemency order cited Kincaid’s work in the prison print shop and his habit of sharing hygiene items with other inmates. That one went through.

Governor Ferguson has shown he’ll step in

Washington also has a separate body called the Indeterminate Sentence Review Board, the ISRB, which handles parole decisions for older indeterminate sentences. It doesn’t just recommend release. It orders it. The governor has to actively intervene to stop it. Ferguson has done that twice.

Billy Van Court is a serial rapist whose criminal history stretches back to 1962. His 1983 Washington crime spree included victims as young as 12 and 13. The ISRB released him on parole in 2023.

He fled the state and destroyed his tracking device to avoid being caught. The ISRB found him parolable again anyway in October 2025 and issued a new release order in February 2026. A psychological assessment that same year found he was highly likely to reoffend with a violent offense within five years. Ferguson canceled the ISRB’s release order two weeks ago. He wrote that he was “unconvinced that Mr. Van Court’s rehabilitation is complete.”

Before that, Ferguson reversed former Gov. Inslee’s decision to release Timothy Pauley, convicted of a triple murder at a SeaTac tavern in 1980. Three people killed. Pauley had been set for release. Ferguson canceled it in March 2025.

The Clemency Board recommends. The ISRB releases. Both keep reaching the same conclusion. Ferguson has shown he’ll push back. I hope he does it again.

A sentence should mean something

There are people who’ll argue rehabilitation is real, that people change, that keeping aging prisoners locked up past any reasonable safety risk serves no purpose. That argument isn’t crazy. People do change. Rehabilitation happens.

But here’s what that argument keeps getting wrong. Prison isn’t only about rehabilitation. It’s also punishment. A sentence is society’s statement about what a crime was worth. When you shoot a man in the head in front of his wife and newborn and walk away with their money, a Spokane jury decided that was worth 46 years. Not 30. Not two-thirds. Forty-six.

Travis ComesLast is 50 years old. He is not old. He is not frail. He is not dying. If the board gets its way, he walks out with potentially decades of healthy life ahead of him. Christopher Gongyin got 20 years. His daughter got a childhood without a father and a mother whose seizures never stopped. The board calls releasing ComesLast now the interest of justice. It is worth asking whose.

Board Member Flower called retribution the “only remaining justification” for that sentence and dismissed it. But retribution isn’t a shameful impulse to be rationalized away. It is one of the oldest and most legitimate functions of a justice system. It is the formal answer to a wrong. It is what we owe the people who testified on Dec. 12 and were not called back for the March vote.

Adam Smith wrote in 1759 that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. It isn’t a call for harshness. It’s a recognition that mercy is never free. Someone always pays for it. The board extended compassion to Travis ComesLast on March 12. The bill went to Barbara Gongyin. She didn’t choose to be in this equation. He put her there. And she has been paying ever since the night she watched him shoot her husband in the head while she held their baby in the bedroom she still lives in today.

Ferguson, the Gongyin family is watching. Do the right thing.

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