“Tuesday night is the last time I saw my daughter. ”
The words came out of my mouth, but they didn’t feel real. I was standing in a parking lot outside an apartment complex we didn’t recognize, staring at my daughter’s Chevrolet. Her car.
The one she drove everywhere. It was sitting there, silent, empty, like it had been abandoned in a hurry. Wednesday, she texted me. She never called.
She just said she was going out of town for the week with a girl named Emma. I remember reading that message and thinking it was odd because she always called. Always. But I didn’t want to be the overbearing mom.
I told myself she was 22, she was an adult, she was allowed to go away for a few days. I told myself to trust her. I told myself a lot of things. Then Thanksgiving came.
Thanksgiving is a massive deal in our family. You’re always around your family. There’s no excuse for missing it, not without a call, not without showing up. Jazmine knew that.
She knew how much that dinner meant to her grandmother, to all of us. So when she didn’t show up, when she didn’t even call, every instinct in my body screamed that something was terribly wrong. She sent a message saying she was with her friend, that she wasn’t coming. That wasn’t her.
That would never be her. My Jazzy was the one who was always there, who checked in, who made sure everyone else was okay before she even thought about herself. Her name is Jasmine Pace. We always called her Jazzy.
She was 22 years old, a student at the University of Tennessee. She was studying, working, building her life. She worked for the family construction business, and she was kind, so incredibly kind. Everyone who met her said the same thing.
She was compassionate. She could be that listening ear whenever you were going through something. She was peaceful, loving, caring, friendly, supportive. She was super sweet, outgoing, she cared about people, and she had a lot of friends.
She was very well involved in the community. Her great-grandmother was her world, and she was extremely close to her. So when her grandmother passed away on November 22nd, it hit her hard. She was there, she was with her family when her grandmother took her last breath.
She stood there, holding her hand, and at some point that evening, she left. She needed some air. She needed some space. We didn’t think much of it at the time.
We thought she was going home to grieve in her own way. Two days later, she was gone. Then a post appeared on her social media. It was a photo, and something felt off.
The photo was quite suggestive. Jazmine normally wouldn’t do that. She was a private person, she wasn’t one to post things like that. And look closer, and there was a tattoo missing from her right shoulder.
That tattoo was a part of her, a part of who she was. It would indicate that it was an old photo, that it wasn’t from that day. Someone had posted a photo that wasn’t even recent, and that made us panic even more. What the hell is going on?
I kept asking myself. What the hell is happening to my daughter? I used an app linked to her vehicle. It tracked her movements.
I pulled up the last known location, and we drove straight there. We found ourselves outside these apartments on Mountain Creek Road. I dialed 911 immediately. My hands were shaking.
“Hamilton County 911. What’s the location of your emergency? ”
“900 Mountain Creek Road,” I said, my voice barely holding together. “My daughter has been missing.
I haven’t heard from her since Wednesday and she’s had no phone activity and we just located her vehicle outside these apartments. It’s been here since Wednesday night at 8:47 and has not left since. We have reason to suspect that she may be in danger. ”
The police arrived, and I could see the patience in their eyes, that practiced calm they’re trained to use.
But I wasn’t calm. I was falling apart on the inside. I told them what I knew. “She texted, we never actually spoke to her,” I said.
“She texted and said she was going out of town for the week with a girl friend, Emma. I just talked to Emma today. She did not go out of town with Emma. ”
You could see the confusion on the officer’s face.
I pointed at the car. “Tuesday night is the last time I saw my daughter. Wednesday, it came right here and hasn’t been moved since. I pulled up her phone records.
She has not made any phone calls since Tuesday night and someone has been resetting her passwords. ”
“Have y’all been in any arguments or anything recently? ” he asked. I shook my head.
“Nothing like that. Everybody’s close. Her granny lived with us and passed Tuesday night. ” I paused.
“No, everybody’s been fine. There’s been no arguments. And she’s never done that. ”
The officer asked if he could look inside the car.
We opened the door, and I felt my stomach drop. The seat was further back than Jazmine would have ever had it. Jazmine was very petite. She was short and she was small.
The seat had been moved way back, like someone else had driven it. Someone much taller. Someone who wasn’t my daughter. The officer kept asking questions, but my mind was racing.
I knew something was wrong. I knew it in every bone of my body. They said they could list her as missing in the national database. They said if anybody came across her, it would pop up as a red missing person.
They said they’d call an investigator. They said a lot of things that I barely heard. I just kept staring at that seat. That seat that was too far back.
That seat that proved someone else had been in my daughter’s car. When you look at missing person statistics, it’s not common for women in their 20s to go missing and not be found relatively quickly. Most missing persons who are female are juveniles. But this wasn’t some statistic.
This was my daughter. This was Jazzy. I wasn’t going to just sit around and wait for a phone call. I wasn’t going to wait for the police to do their thing.
I was going to find her myself if it was the last thing I did. The police were limited in what they could do, but I wasn’t. I kept tracking her vehicle through the app, going back further and further in time. And I found something.
The car had been to Tremont Street previously. The exact address had already been sent by Jazmine to me. A pin drop. In the middle of the night, around 2:15 a.
m. , on the night she went missing, she had sent me her location. I didn’t see it at first. I didn’t check my messages.
It was only when I was really searching for her that I went back into my text history and saw it sitting there. “Oh my gosh,” I said out loud. “She sent me her location. ”
We drove straight there.
It was an apartment complex on Tremont Street, just 5 miles away from where her car had been found. We started talking to the neighbors, canvassing the building. A couple that lived there said they heard a scream. A scream of what seemed like a female, around the time Jazmine went missing.
It came from inside apartment 210. The occupant, a student named Jason Chen. The name was familiar. Jazmine had been casually seeing him.
She was a young female, she was not in a serious relationship, she was casually seeing a student at the local university, Jason Chen. Some of her family members had met him, but her parents had not. I didn’t know his face. I didn’t know who he was.
But I was about to find out. We went up to the apartment. I was desperate, frantic, out of my mind with worry. I wasn’t thinking about warrants or protocols.
I was thinking about my daughter. We broke in. We walked through that door, and I saw it almost immediately. My daughter’s driver’s license.
Her credit cards. Everything right there in the open, scattered like junk. And I freaked out. I dialed 911 again, my voice breaking.
“We are at 110 Tremont, room 210 on the second floor. What’s going on? My daughter’s driver’s license, her credit cards, everything is right here in the open. And I’m freaking out.
” The operator told me to wait in the hallway, that officers were en route. I couldn’t breathe. I knew that something bad had happened. Those were items you would not leave behind.
A driver’s license. Your credit cards. You don’t just abandon those. I knew something was deeply, deeply wrong.
The officers arrived and went inside. They did a quick sweep. “Is she in there? ” I asked, my voice cracking.
“She’s not in here,” one of them said. “No, no one inside. ” But I heard one of them comment on the smell. It smelled like rotting food.
And then one of them noticed something else. Long hair, down by the floor. Kicks. That’s definitely female.
I felt my blood run cold. There was evidence inside that apartment that pointed to a woman being there. And that woman was my daughter. A missing child is one of the greatest fears any parent would have.
You instantly go to very dark places. Is my child hurt? Is my child alive? Is she being held against her will?
I couldn’t stop those thoughts from racing through my head. The officers needed to speak with the neighbors who’d heard the scream. One of them pulled out his phone. “I heard some yelling,” he said.
“I took a note on my phone. November 23rd, that was Wednesday night. I wrote down the time of 2:15 a. m.
” The time of the scream exactly matched when Jazmine had sent me the pin drop. It was all connected. It was all happening in that apartment. The police needed to find Jason Chen.
They had his information. They were calling him. He wasn’t responding. They did not know where he was.
While they searched for him, a full-scale search operation was underway for Jazmine. The community wanted to help. Everyone was looking for her. Her mom was frantic.
She was clearly very popular, she had a lot of people who cared about her. Chattanooga is such a close-knit community that when someone goes missing like this, it spreads like wildfire. There were posts all over social media, people sharing her photo, begging anyone with information to come forward. “Please stop scrolling and help me find my friend.
Share it. Get the word out. ” It was truly horrific. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
The police executed a search warrant on Jason Chen’s apartment. They used a tool called luminol, a substance that can identify the presence of blood. With the naked eye, most of the investigators could not see any blood, but when they turned the lights off and used that luminol, it lit up like a horror movie. They found quantities of blood that were not survivable.
This was not a faint trace. This was a massive, overwhelming amount of blood. Whoever’s blood that was, they were most likely not alive. They took a sample from Jazmine’s toothbrush at our house to compare it to the blood in the apartment.
They sent it off to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, asking for it to be tested as soon as possible. Outside the apartment, by a dumpster, they discovered items covered in blood. Jason Chen had gone from a person of interest to the primary suspect in possibly a homicide. They checked the neighborhood for surveillance footage.
They got a lucky break when they checked the security footage from a nearby store. The morning after Jazmine went missing, Jason Chen was captured on camera buying cleaning products. And what was especially interesting was that throughout these videos, he wore a very distinct hat that made him extremely easy to identify. That hat appeared again and again.
Another local store provided even more unsettling scenes. He was buying bandages and hydrogen peroxide. He was cleaning up. He was trying to erase what he had done.
There’s something called the illusion of invulnerability, which is when perpetrators think they can’t get caught. They’re overconfident in their ability to get away with a crime. Having a really distinctive hat could be an oversight, but it could also be someone who’s just incredibly overconfident, thinking it doesn’t matter what I wear, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing because I’m not going to get caught. The day after Jazmine went missing, doorbell footage captured Jason returning to his apartment multiple times.
And when they checked the street camera outside the apartment, they made another shocking discovery. They were able to locate video footage of Jazmine’s vehicle actually leaving his apartment. And that hat became important again, because they believed the figure in the driver’s seat of the vehicle could be identified as Jason Chen based on the hat he was wearing. Why would Jason Chen be driving Jazmine’s car?
What had happened to her? The camera on the street corner looked up Tremont Street to Jason Chen’s apartment. They could see Jason coming and going, and ultimately, they could see him taking a suitcase out the front door of his apartment and driving away. The contents of that suitcase remained a mystery.
But I had a terrible feeling I already knew. Then the DNA results came back. The blood in the apartment was confirmed to be Jazmine’s. The moment when my family had to be told that we did not expect to find her alive, based on the blood found in his apartment, was the moment we just had to be honest with ourselves.
At that point, we were all realistic that we were simply looking for a body. Eight days after Jazmine went missing, police were finally able to access Jason’s cell phone location data. It led them on a drive 2 hours away from Chattanooga to Nolansville, Tennessee. A house owned by Jason Chen’s parents.
Detective Crawford knocked on the door, and Jason’s father answered. “Police. Mr. Chen?
” The father confirmed his name. “Hey, I’m Detective Crawford. Came here to speak with your son, Jason. ”
Jason emerged from the shadows.
He was calm. Eerily calm. The detective told him he was going to have to go with them. “You’re going to go with this officer right here.
We’re going to pat you down, make sure you don’t have anything on you. Sit you down in the back of the police car. Put your hands up. ”
“Why would I need to be put in the police car?
” Jason asked. “You can’t go down there. You’re not free to go down there by yourself. ”
“Is there any like probable cause or anything?
”
Asking about probable cause. That felt like legal language. It could suggest he’d been researching what the police need in order to arrest him, what evidence they need to prosecute him. And that, given the circumstances, felt suspicious.
They put his hands behind his back and took him into custody. When they tried to conduct an interview with him, he chose not to say anything. But a search of his parents’ house led to more incriminating evidence. His vehicle was meticulously cleaned, sitting in his parents’ garage while their own vehicles were in the driveway.
Police also discovered handwritten notes about Jazmine’s life and a complete timeline of their interactions. He had been studying her. He had been planning. Or at the very least, he had been obsessing.
Jason Chen was in custody, but Jazmine was still missing. We needed to find her. We needed to bring her home. In any homicide prosecution, you always want to have a body.
It is vitally important to prove there was an unlawful killing. Absent a body, there’s always a reasonable doubt that the person is still alive. We knew he was a suspect in a homicide, but we did not have Jazmine. That’s what we needed.
Using Jason Chen’s cell phone location data, investigators worked on pinpointing his movements around the time Jazmine went missing. They found that he was all over town, but at one point, he was in a very suspicious place, on the bank of the Tennessee River. When the investigators arrived in the secluded area off Suck Creek Road, west of Chattanooga, they immediately noticed a suitcase. They dragged it up onto flat ground, opened it up, and immediately felt what they recognized to be a human body.
The medical examiner took x-ray images of the suitcase’s contents. The body was wrapped in three separate garbage bags, curled into what’s described as the fetal position. The body was confirmed to be Jazmine Pace. My daughter.
My little girl. Jazmine had been handcuffed twice. Once with a handcuff to her wrist attached to her right leg, another with a set of leg shackles. One of the shackles was affixed around her elbow area, and the other one to her opposite left leg.
The report of the medical examiner was very chilling. It told us that Jazmine had been stabbed 60 times. In her shoulder, in her throat, in her head, in her abdomen. It described a large portion of a large knife being broken off in her lung.
She died of blood loss and aspirated on her own blood. The brutality of it was beyond comprehension. This had nothing to do with self-defense. Nothing to do with someone acting impulsively once or twice.
This was someone who intentionally kept going, stabbing her over and over again, either to cause maximum damage while she was still alive or maximum damage to her body afterwards. This was an obvious and clear case of overkill. It was a tough case for everybody, just the gruesome nature of it, the uniqueness based on what we typically see in terms of violent crime in Chattanooga. It was a tough process to go through with her family.
As trial approached, it was somber. While we were preparing, there was a crucial late discovery of more evidence. The detective called us, and I will never forget his words. “We found her SIM card and it was in Jason Chen’s backpack.
” The fact that the criminal defendant has the victim’s SIM card in his possession is just great evidence. There is no explanation for that. It was the cherry on top of this case. It proved that Jason had been impersonating Jazmine after she was killed.
She was murdered around 2:15 in the morning. Then it wasn’t until that night, around 6:00 to 6:30 p. m. , that we know he took her body to the bank of the Tennessee River.
During that day, he was texting her, as if she was still alive. He was ensuring that her phone, which he had in his possession, appeared that the messages were read. He posted a picture of him holding a drink in his hand. The problem with that was the photograph metadata showed that it was actually taken months and months before the homicide.
It was fake. He knew Jazmine was dead, and he was trying to create a digital alibi for himself. The trial began in January 2025. It was shocking when, in the defendant’s opening statement, his attorney admitted, “Yeah, he did kill her, but he did it in a state of passion.
He was provoked. ” The defense claimed that Jazmine had attacked Jason with a wine bottle after discovering that he was messaging other girls on Tinder. It seemed basically impossible that she could have posed any physical threat to Jason. And with the cell phone data, it was revealed that the day before Jason killed Jazmine, he had not received one message on Tinder.
But the cell phone data also revealed Jason did use a dating app within 6 hours of killing Jazmine. He had been messaging other girls mere hours after he had killed her, telling them, “Hey, I guess we’re boyfriend girlfriend now. ” And he was playing video games with her body still in the apartment, talking about “Hey, let’s run some Call of Duty. ” All of this was happening while Jazmine was dead in the apartment.
It felt like the act of a psychopath. It felt like someone who didn’t care and was getting on with his life rather than panicking and trying to deal with the consequences. After an 8-day trial, Jason Chen was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole. What he did was so heinous, so unprovoked, so uncalled for, that I think Jason Chen had forfeited his right to ever come back into society.
Because we don’t need monsters like that in our society. I miss Jazmine’s personality, her compassion, her empathy. Jazmine should be remembered for her kind spirit. We did a candlelight vigil for her, celebrating her life and who she was as a person.
There were about 200 people at the vigil. Seeing all those people come out and show their love and support, it was a positive atmosphere for anyone to come out and celebrate the memory of Jazmine. She left a really big impact on the community. And that shows with all the people who came to her candlelight.
We would like Jazmine to be remembered as the ray of sunshine within her friends and family group that she was. She was vibrant. She was beautiful. She was always there.
She was loyal. She had everything going for her. And that’s part of why this was so tragic. But she certainly was a ray of sunshine, and that’s a message that we’ll continue to try to get across.
In murder cases, victims almost always know and trust the perpetrators, which is why the perpetrators are able to get them into compromising situations in the first place. They effectively hijack the victim’s intuition. They override all the cues you could be looking for, all the red flags, and turn them around, making themselves seem like nice guys. That’s what Jason Chen did to my daughter.
He made himself seem like a nice guy. And she paid for that trust with her life. In the UK, in Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, one of the largest cities in the Midlands with over 250,000 people, known as the home of pottery in the UK, with a football team nicknamed The Potters, but statistically, a higher-than-average crime rate, it was home to 18-year-old Megan Newton. Megan was studying sports science at Newcastle College.
She was a talented football player and recently got a tattoo to show her love for the game. Megan had three jobs. And in her spare time, she coached an under-7s girls football team. She was a caring person.
She loved children. She gave up her spare time to help them get better. Megan’s dream was to get a sports scholarship to study in America. She had real ambition for her life.
Friday, April 19th, 2019. Megan was working her usual evening shift at a local fish and chip shop. She finished at around 9:30. After her shift, Megan went home to get changed.
She went to meet some friends in a pub, and then they all went to a club together. They were having a lovely evening. Megan was happily showing off her new tattoo. At 2:45 a.
m. , Megan left the club and took a taxi home. The next morning, a worrying discovery. Neighbors found a set of keys covered in blood in a car park outside Megan’s apartment.
Some people who lived in the block were able to establish who belonged to one of the ground floor flats. So, out of concern for the occupant there, they opened the door, they went in. And what they found was a naked female laying on the bed, quite clearly deceased, and quite clearly suffering from some horrendous injuries. They came away and dialed 999.
Police immediately responded to the scene. The witnesses took them to the flat, and it was quite obvious from her injuries and the blood at the scene that this wasn’t an accident. Inside, they also found a knife, a knife that they believed was the one that caused the injuries, making this a crucial piece of evidence. There was no doubt this was now a murder investigation.
The woman was confirmed to be Megan Newton. Her flat was now a crime scene. Investigators urgently needed to find Megan’s killer. They needed to build up a picture of her movements that night.
Where had she been? Who had she been with? They found CCTV footage from outside the club. They identified Megan leaving in a taxi.
In that taxi was one of her female friends and a male. This clip shows the three of them getting in the cab. They all look comfortable, and to all intents and purposes, there’s nothing suspicious going on. Police then searched for surveillance cameras close to Megan’s home.
They found footage of Megan and the man walking towards her apartment. By now, the cab had dropped them off and there were just the two of them now. There were cameras in and around Megan’s flat, cameras that overlooked her front door. When detectives searched through the recording, they identified Megan arriving home around 3:45 a.
m. And she wasn’t alone. She was with a male. Tall, slim, young, white with dark hair.
They’re smiling. They look happy. There was no aggravation between them. There’s definitely nothing at this point that you would point out as looking suspicious.
But analysis of the man’s behavior revealed a subtle change in his demeanor. What was once quite relaxed shifts. He stands quite close to Megan. He looks around.
We don’t know if he’s responding to a noise or scoping out to see if someone’s watching him, but there’s definitely something that shifted. Two hours passed. Then, he appeared on camera again. As the man leaves Megan’s apartment, it looks like he is quite calm.
He walks. He doesn’t run. He seems very composed as he makes his way to the door. An exterior camera captured him as he left Megan’s building.
He looks really very casual. With his right hand, he throws something down. The object appeared to land in the same spot where the neighbors had found Megan’s keys covered in blood. Again, he seems quite calm, doesn’t seem phased.
He’s even checking his phone. It doesn’t seem like anything is amiss. Of all the video footage, this clip is the one that really hits home. As he’s walking away, he looks down, and we can see that there’s something on his hand.
You can see the color of it. It’s red. When police spoke to Megan’s friends, they discovered the man in the footage was Joseph Trevor. A 19-year-old semi-professional footballer who had attended the same school as Megan.
Both of his parents were police officers. Remarkably, it wasn’t the first time he’d come to the notice of police. Because that evening, before he met Megan, he’d been stopped by bouncers and found to have white powder on him. They called the police, and he was dealt with for this white powder that turned out to be ketamine.
The police detained him, but the decision was made that he was not fit to be detained. He’d been drinking, potentially taking drugs. So, those drugs were taken from him, and he was given a bail date to come to the police station at a later time. After Joseph Trevor was released from the police station, he went straight to the Kill nightclub where he met Megan.
And just a few hours after he left Megan’s apartment alone, officers were called out to a potential suicide threat. The police were called to a male who was sitting on the side of a bridge over the A500. When police arrived, they found that male was Joseph Trevor. He was sitting there in a way that caused concern.
He was on the side of a bridge overlooking a road. Was somebody looking to take their own life? Joseph was taken to the hospital. He was seen by a mental health worker and picked up by his dad.
We don’t know exactly what was going through Joseph Trevor’s mind. It could be guilt, it could be remorse, it could be shame. However, in these instances, self-preservation outweighs guilt. What unfolded may have been much more in response to a fear of the consequences rather than true remorse for what he had done.
Joseph Trevor went home, to the house he lived at with his mom and dad. He decided to confess to his family. He told them, “I’ve done something bad. ” For Joseph Trevor’s parents, who are both police officers, hearing the news about what he did must have been devastating.
But the reality is there was only one outcome. In order for Megan to have justice, they had to forego protecting their son. His parents phoned the police and informed them that the murderer of Megan Newton was in fact their son, Joseph Trevor. Joseph Trevor was arrested and charged with the murder of Megan Newton.
When someone commits a crime such as this, it’s important to understand, is this a one-off? Have they done anything like this in the past? In the case of Joseph Trevor, it appeared that he had. When he was 15 years old, he’d been arrested for sexual assault.
That was never prosecuted, but it gave a clue as to why and how this happened to Megan. The autopsy report revealed the full extent of Megan’s injuries. Doctor Brett Lockyer, a forensic pathologist, was able to determine that there were nine stab wounds to the back of her neck. Those stab wounds had entered into her chest and had injured both her lungs.
He had also found injuries to her neck, which would indicate she had been strangled. There had been a period of neck compression followed by nine stab wounds. This sustained and brutal attack is the reason why Megan died. The autopsy also confirmed Megan had been sexually assaulted.
This is a very disturbing and violent crime. From a psychological perspective, this is overkill. And overkill often suggests there is an intense emotional experience like rage, sadism. It’s about power and control.
We also have to acknowledge that the throat is where our voice resides. Strangulation can be seen as a way to silence a victim, especially if they’ve been rejected or if there’s resistance, or even to silence the victim from speaking about what actually happened. In that moment, the perpetrator has that person’s life literally in their hands. They choose if they live or die.
It’s about inflicting anxiety, terror in the victim, but also exerting dominance. In court, the full details of the evening Megan was killed came to light. On that evening, she’d taken him home in order to stop him getting into trouble with his parents. Trevor repaid her by raping her, murdering her, and then leaving her dead in her own apartment before fleeing the scene.
This was a brutal and sustained attack showing no regard for Megan’s life. Joseph Trevor had expressed a desire not to go home because he was intoxicated and he didn’t want his parents to see him in that state. Megan, being the understanding friend she was, offered to share her sanctuary with him. But he abused it, took advantage of it, and attacked her and killed her in her own home.
This really does highlight how Megan’s act of kindness was met with betrayal, and ultimately, her losing her life. The video evidence gave police a rare insight into the mind of Joseph Trevor. It’s quite unusual to get a glimpse of a killer soon after the murder has taken place. You don’t often get that look into their eyes as you do in this instance when he’s coming out of that flat.
Knowing that this man’s the killer invites us to look at this clip differently. The calmness that we’re seeing takes on a different quality. It’s quite chilling. It’s cold.
It’s callous. And it has no indication of what has just taken place moments before. In February 2020, Joseph Trevor was sentenced to 21 years for the murder and rape of Megan Newton. It’s really important that talking about Megan’s murder doesn’t take away her dignity.
While it’s an important case that real lessons can be learned, we have to hold in mind that a real woman, a young woman, a woman who had her whole life ahead of her, is at the center of this. Megan brought lots of joy to many people. She was kind, compassionate, and caring, and she will be missed by not only her friends and her family, but her community. Megan was a keen footballer, not only in terms of playing, but also teaching the younger generation to play this sport and encouraging women to get involved.
This is inspiring. This is incredibly hopeful. This is what Megan should be remembered for.
