Jason Chen enters the courtroom
A defense attorney told a Criminal Court jury on Monday that Jason Chen killed Jasmine Pace after she found where he had called other young women and she came after him with a wine bottle.
Josh Weiss said Chen ran from her to a bathroom and then the bedroom, where he found a knife and began stabbing her. He said Chen blacked out during the incident and awoke to find her lifeless body.
Attorney Weiss told the jury that Chen then handcuffed her so that she would fit in a suitcase, then he put the body in garbage bags and into the suitcase.
He said Chen "did a bad job" of trying to clean up the blood, and he made some texts and calls after her death to try to get an alibi.
Attorney Weiss said Chen took Ms.
Pace's car to an apartment complex on Mountain Creek Road and dumped the body along Suck Creek Road near the Tennessee River.
Attorney Weiss said Chen is guilty of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, not premeditated first-degree murder as he is charged. Chen is also charged with abuse of a corpse.
The attorney charged that the Chattanooga Police Department was "incompetent" in the case, saying the victim's mother could not get any help and wound up going in the Chen apartment several times. He said in doing so she spoiled some of the evidence.
Attorney Weiss charged that during the family's ventures into the apartment that evidence was "planted," including a knife on a bed that was not seen in earlier photos of the bed.
Chen is charged with her murder in a case that has drawn widespread attention, including crews from the Law and Crime TV show and NBC's Dateline at the current trial at the City-County Courts Building. Over 2,900 were watching a live stream of the trial.
Attorney Weiss said the couple dated for several months in 2021 after meeting online, then resumed the relationship in 2022, including a trip together to Chicago. The attorney said Ms. Pace was much more infatuated with Chen than he was with her.
The attorney said that night that the couple had sex and drank wine together. He said at one point while Chen was opening a bottle of wine that she found his cellphone. She began looking through it and saw calls to other young women, enraging her.
Prosecutors said Monday they believed Ms. Pace was bound and in a fetal position when she was stabbed 60 times at Chen's apartment on Tremont Street. Her left arm was handcuffed to her left ankle and her right arm was bound to the right ankle, it was stated.
The body of Ms. Pace was found stuffed in a suitcase along Suck Creek Road near the Tennessee River.
District Attorney Coty Wamp said, "The blood of Jasmine Pace was found all over that apartment." Holding up the suitcase for the jury, she said Chen's fingerprints were found on the trash bags inside the suitcase. The DA said one of the knife slashes was a "through and through" injury and another was so fierce that the knife point broke off.
Catrina Pace Beene, mother of the victim, said after her daughter disappeared, she and other family members began a frantic search for her. She said the MyChevy ap from Jasmine's vehicle showed it going on Nov. 22, 2022, to 108 Tremont St. She said she did not know at the time that it was Chen's apartment.
Ms. Beene said the ap showed the Chevy going to a parking lot at 900 Mountain Creek Road. She and others found the car there.
She said the family then went to the Tremont address and knocked on numerous doors.
Ms. Beene said she checked her daughter's call log and noticed she had talked to someone for 71 minutes the day before her disappeance. She said she dialed that number and it was answered by Chen. She said he did not seemed concerned. She said he eventually said he had to get off the phone, saying he was at the Airport.
The mother said she looked back in the text messages and noticed that Jasmine had sent her a "pin drop" indicating her location - 110 Tremont. She said, "I was scared. Jasmine had never sent me a pin drop location in the middle of the night."
She said she and other family members went straight to the apartment building and were let in by a man who lived there. She said, "We knocked on every door asking if they had seen my daughter. I showed them pictures."
Ms. Beene said she was told by a resident that he had heard a scream from Apt. 210 - Chen's unit - two minutes from the time her daughter had sent the pin drop.
She said when no one answered the door she got inside by using a credit card. She said she quickly spotted some of Jasmine's items inside, including a driver's license, credit card and travel bag.
Ms. Beene said two patrol officers came to the scene, examined the apartment, spoke to the neighbor, then left. She said the group went down to their car, but went back up to the Chen apartment when they left. She said she took electronics and other items, hoping "to find a clue where my daughter was."
She said that was Nov. 17, and she had not slept for several days.
She denied that she planted any evidence in the apartment, saying, "I was still just trying to find my daughter." She said she did not find city police helpful early in the case, and one officer told her not to call him over the weekend.
Ms. Beene said Jasmine, who ran the office for the family's construction company, was very private and she had never introduced her to Chen.
Zack Crawford, the lead detective on the case, said he got involved when a fellow detective called him on Sunday, Nov. 27, and asked if he had been seeing Facebook posts from the Pace family about Jasmine's disappearance. He said he began studying those posts, then soon got a call from his supervisor asking him to look into it.
He said he went to the police station and interviewed the Pace family, then obtained a search warrant for the Chen apartment. Detective Crawford said he spotted blood not long after entering the 500-square-foot apartment.
In the kitchen, he said when the chemical agent Blue Star was added, "It illuminated an extremely large area of blood. It was the most I had seen in my homicide career."
He said in the Chen closet there was a void where it appeared a suitcase may have once been.
Asked why he got into the case four days after the disappearance, the witness said he had not gotten any information from Missing Persons about the case.
The jury had been due to hear opening statements on Monday morning, but instead attorneys quizzed an Atlanta forensic psychologist who recently interviewed Chen at the Nashville jail and opined that it is highly unlikely that he formed pre-meditation.
Dr. Douglas Lewis said he made the conclusion reviewing evidence in the case that he was furnished and a 3.75-hour conversation with the defendant.
He said it appeared that Chen, who was a scholarship student at UTC, had a traumatic childhood. He said he showed a lot of depression and anxiety.
Dr. Lewis said on the night that Ms. Pace died Chen told him that they drank a bottle of wine together, smoked marijuana joints and then used "wax" which he said is a strong form of marijuana.
Prosecutors objected strenuously to allowing the late testimony, saying they would have no time to reply and find their own expert.
Judge Boyd Patterson ruled that the evidence could not come in, saying the testimony was speculative and of little value to the jury.
The jury was picked in Nashville last Wednesday and Thursday and then brought to Chattanooga on Sunday to hear evidence. The case is expected to take 10 days to two weeks.