The mastermind of a murder-for-hire plot that targeted a Bucks County nurse was sentenced to life in prison
Ebony Pack's mother called Chong Ling Dan a monster Monday during his sentencing hearing in Norristown.
Drawing on the heartbreak only a mother who lost a child can muster, Rhonda Pack Terry confronted the man who killed her daughter.
“You’re a monster,” Pack Terry told Chong Ling Dan as he sat, shackled, in a Norristown courtroom Monday. “You stalked my daughter, you planned her execution. And you sit there, remorseless. You took her ... and for what?”
Dan, 50, of North Philadelphia, had no reaction to her words. He sat impassively moments later, when Montgomery County Judge William Carpenter sentenced him to life in prison for the 2020 death of Ebony Pack.
Pack, a nurse who cared for COVID patients, was gunned down two days after Thanksgiving as she sat in her car, stopped at a red light in Lansdale.
In late September, on what would have been Pack’s 32nd birthday, a jury convicted Dan of first-degree murder for orchestrating a plot to have her killed.
He targeted Pack, prosecutors said, as an act of revenge against Jasmine Stokes, his former girlfriend. Dan was fuming over his tumultuous breakup with Stokes, who owed him $9,000 and who had recently begun dating Pack.
“The sentence in this case reflects the defendant’s lack of respect for life, and his lack of respect for Ebony’s life,” Assistant District Attorney Brianna Ringwood said after the hearing Monday. “She was a family person, and he stole from her all the joy she would’ve seen in her life.”
» READ MORE: A trial into the murder of a Bucks County nurse opens with dueling accounts of who was responsible
Dan was convicted alongside Ricky Vance, 53, who prosecutors said tailed Pack for about 13 miles as she traveled from her home in Feasterville to Stokes’ house in Lansdale. Vance was sentenced last week to life in prison.
A third man, the alleged gunman who prosecutors say rode with Vance, has been missing since shortly before Vance’s arrest in 2021. Terrance Marche, 47, was last seen boarding a flight to Honduras to meet with Dan, who was there at the time. Dan later told Marche’s girlfriend that Marche would not be returning to Philadelphia, prosecutors say.
In court, Dan’s attorneys cast doubt on the evidence gathered against him. On the night of the shooting, they said, he was nowhere near Lansdale, and was visiting several women he was dating at the time. He had no connection to Vance, they said, who was a longtime friend of Marche.
Witnesses including Dan’s daughter told the jury he was a good man, a businessman who dabbled in real estate and cared about others. He handed out turkeys in Germantown on Thanksgiving; he was no murderer, they said.
But Ringwood, citing testimony from Stokes and cell-phone records from Dan and Vance, contended Dan was “narcissistic” and abusive — and killed Pack to punish Stokes.
On Monday, as Pack’s mother confronted her daughter’s killer, she spoke of her enduring loss and lamented a life cut short. She said he deserved the punishment.
“You have no regard or respect for human life,” she said, “and I have no respect for yours.”