In November 2022, a 22-year-old woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, vanished the night before Thanksgiving. What followed exposed a troubling deception and a family’s determined search for answers.
A Holiday Disappearance
Jasmine Pace was a 22-year-old community college student living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She had planned to spend Thanksgiving 2022 with her family, a tradition that mattered to her despite a difficult year.
Weeks earlier, she had lost her grandmother to cancer, and the grief had occasionally led her to withdraw from friends and family for short stretches of time.
On the night before Thanksgiving, just before 11:30 p.m., Jasmine left her mother Catrina’s home and drove away in her white Chevrolet Equinox.
She sent a message saying she would spend the rest of the week at the home of her friend Emma. Because of her recent loss, her decision to skip the family gathering did not immediately concern her mother.
That changed when a new post appeared on Jasmine’s Facebook page. It read, “enjoying Thanksgiving with my baby,” accompanied by a photograph. Catrina noticed two things right away.
The outfit in the photo was far more revealing than anything her daughter would typically post, and the tattoos that covered Jasmine’s upper right arm were missing.
Each of those tattoos marked a specific date in her life, so their absence meant the photograph could not have been taken that day.
The image had clearly been taken months earlier and used to make it appear as though Jasmine was safe and enjoying the holiday. Someone else was controlling her accounts, and her family began to fear the worst.
A Family Takes Action
Catrina contacted Emma directly and learned that Jasmine had never arrived at her home that week. Several other friends and relatives had also received messages claiming to be from Jasmine, each stating that she wanted to be left alone.
In every case, the person had not actually spoken to her. With this pattern established, the family began searching for her on their own.
Jasmine’s Chevrolet Equinox was equipped with a tracking feature called myChevrolet, which allowed Catrina to locate the vehicle remotely. Using the app, the family found the SUV parked outside a condominium complex on Mountain Creek Road called Signal View Condos.
It was discovered on the evening of November 26, four days after Jasmine had last been seen. When the family reached the vehicle, they noticed the driver’s seat had been pushed back, positioned for someone much taller than Jasmine’s petite frame.
As far as the family knew, Jasmine had no connection to anyone living at that complex. They called the police to file a missing person report, but officers noted that because Jasmine was an adult and there were no obvious signs of a crime, little additional action was taken at that time.
Determined to find her, Catrina turned to the family’s cell phone provider, which gave her access to Jasmine’s call records. No calls had been made from the phone in days, but Catrina found one number Jasmine had spoken with for more than an hour on the night she disappeared.
When Catrina called it, a young man answered. His name was Jason Chen, a computer science student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Jasmine had met him on the dating app Bumble, and the two had been seeing each other for several months, though the relationship had not progressed to the point of meeting either of her parents.
When told Jasmine was missing, Jason claimed he had not heard from her in days and that their last conversation had lasted only a few minutes.
Catrina knew this was false, since the phone records showed they had spoken for 71 minutes. His lack of concern, combined with the lie, struck her as another warning sign.
As word of her disappearance spread, childhood friends also joined the effort to find her, sharing her story publicly and urging anyone with information to come forward. Despite this outpouring of support, no new leads emerged from outside the family’s own investigation.
With police response limited, Catrina and Travis returned to the condominium complex and went door to door asking residents if they had seen their daughter. A security guard agreed to share surveillance footage from the parking lot.
Using the timestamps from the myChevrolet app, the family located footage from the evening of November 23, showing the SUV entering the lot around 8:30 p.m. and heading toward the spot where it was later found. The driver could not be identified from the recording.
While reviewing her phone, Catrina discovered one more message she had overlooked. Sent from Jasmine’s phone at 2:18 a.m. on November 23, it contained no words, only a dropped location pin showing where the device was at that moment.
Jasmine had never sent anything like it before. The location led to an apartment building at 110 Tremont Street. The following day, Catrina and Travis went there and knocked on every door.
All of the residents answered except one, apartment 210. Neighbors told the family they had heard a disturbance coming from that unit in the early hours of November 23, around 2:15 a.m.
A Crime Scene Uncovered
Catrina and Travis made their way into apartment 210. A notebook near the door identified the occupant as Jason Chen. The apartment was small, with an open kitchen just a few feet from the couch, a single bedroom down a short hallway, one bathroom, and a stacked washer and laundry unit in a closet.
On the kitchen counter, the couple found a small travel bag belonging to Jasmine. In a desk drawer, Travis found his daughter’s driver’s license and credit cards, which he removed and set out where they could be easily seen.
Chattanooga police were called again, and officers spoke briefly with the family and the neighbors before leaving.
Over the following hours, Catrina returned to the apartment several times, collecting notebooks, electronics, multiple cell phones, a camera, and an iPad, believing these items might help locate her daughter.
She and Travis also searched the dumpsters outside the building. It was nearly midnight before Chattanooga police returned to the address, this time with a search warrant, and began a formal investigation of the unit.
During their initial walkthrough, investigators identified what appeared to be blood on the hardwood floor of the living room, absorbed into the grout of the bathroom tile, on the bedroom carpet, and spattered across a bathroom wall and door.
The apartment contained an unusual number of cleaning supplies, and several trash bags had already been emptied. When police checked the dumpsters outside, they recovered a pair of white sneakers and a pair of blue trousers.
Inside the unit, they found fragments of broken glass in the living room. In the bedroom, indentations in the carpet showed that furniture had recently been rearranged, seemingly to cover a large stain beneath the bed.
A kitchen knife was found resting on top of the bed. Investigators sprayed the apartment with Bluestar, a forensic chemical used to reveal blood that has been cleaned or is otherwise invisible to the eye, and the hallway lit up under the reaction. With this evidence, the case was reclassified as a homicide investigation.
Piecing Together a Timeline
Detectives gathered surveillance footage from the apartment building and the surrounding area to reconstruct Jason Chen’s movements. The recordings confirmed that Jasmine’s Equinox had arrived at 110 Tremont before midnight on November 22.
The following evening, around 8:30 p.m., a figure wearing a light-colored hoodie was recorded driving the SUV away from the building toward Signal View Condos.
A dark-colored Prius, believed to be a hired car, picked up the driver at the condos and returned them to Jason’s apartment building.
A doorbell camera positioned beside an exit near the parking lot recorded Jason Chen leaving the building multiple times on November 23, including at 8:27 p.m., just three minutes before the hooded figure moved the SUV.
Investigators also traced several other trips Jason made during the holiday. On the morning of November 23, he visited a Walmart alone, purchasing bandages, peroxide, and cleaning products.
At the self-checkout, he rang up some of the higher-priced items as cheaper produce. Overhead camera footage clearly showed him wearing white sneakers matching the pair later found near the apartment dumpsters.
At some point that day, he also stopped at a Walgreens and bought a package of paper towels. Throughout the surveillance footage, his light-colored hoodie made him easy to identify even in low-quality recordings.
Around 6:00 p.m. that evening, the hoodie was seen again, this time struggling to pull a large suitcase from the building’s entrance toward the parking lot. Shortly afterward, his black Toyota Camry was recorded leaving the area.
On November 29, one week after Jasmine was last seen, investigators located Jason Chen at his parents’ home in Nolensville and took him into custody. Officers noted lacerations on his right hand and on his feet, consistent with a physical struggle.
A search warrant for his childhood bedroom turned up a black backpack containing handwritten notes. The notes appeared to be an attempt to prepare a story for police, claiming he had last seen Jasmine on November 19 and spoken to her by phone on the 22nd.
The writings falsely described her as having a history of running away, an active restraining order against a former partner, past periods of homelessness, and a mother struggling with alcohol, all details intended to make her disappearance look voluntary.
Inside the same backpack, hidden in a glasses case, detectives found the SIM card from Jasmine’s phone.
A review of Jason’s own phone revealed a photograph of Jasmine standing in his bathroom, taken the night she disappeared. Investigators also found screenshots he had saved of text messages supposedly from Jasmine, though the original messages themselves were gone.
The following morning, he had sent her a photo with the message “slept like a baby,” and later that day asked if they were still on for dinner. The metadata attached to that photo showed it had actually been taken two years earlier.
Data pulled from Jasmine’s own phone confirmed that her device had traveled to the Walmart with him that morning, even though surveillance footage showed only Jason inside the store.
Her phone’s location data also showed a stop along Suck Creek Road after the suitcase was loaded into his car, a road that runs alongside a river outside the city.
On December 1, investigators searched the riverbank along Suck Creek Road and located the suitcase seen in the earlier surveillance footage. Inside, they found the body of Jasmine Pace, weighing 98 pounds and wrapped in three trash bags.
She had been restrained with two sets of handcuffs, neither of which matched law enforcement-grade equipment. Her right wrist was linked to her right ankle, and her left ankle was connected to her right elbow, with the chain on one set broken.
An autopsy determined she had been stabbed more than 60 times, with the wounds concentrated on the upper left side of her body. The broken tip of a knife blade was recovered from her chest.
Trial, Verdict, and Remembrance
In December 2022, a judge set Jason Chen’s bond at five million dollars. Investigators later determined that after Jasmine’s death, he had used her phone and SIM card to access her bank accounts and social media, posting the fabricated Thanksgiving update to cover her absence.
He also used her accounts to message another woman he had connected with on Tinder, writing, “I guess we’re dating now,” and spent part of that same night playing video games online.
The trial began in January 2025. In his opening statement, defense attorney Josh Weiss told jurors that Jason Chen had killed Jasmine Pace but argued the killing amounted to voluntary manslaughter rather than premeditated murder.
The defense’s account claimed the couple had been drinking wine in his apartment when Jasmine heard dating app notifications coming from his phone, sparking an argument in which she attacked him with a broken wine glass.
According to this version of events, Jason grabbed a kitchen knife that had been used earlier to open the wine bottle and stabbed her in response, later placing her in handcuffs out of panic so her body would fit inside the suitcase.
Prosecutors presented a different picture, built largely from physical evidence and witness testimony. A neighbor, Courtney Brewer, testified that she was woken around 2:00 a.m. on November 23 by screaming, followed by the sound of running footsteps heading toward the apartment’s front door.
The Hamilton County Medical Examiner, Dr. Steven Cogswell, testified that the pattern of wounds indicated Jasmine had been in a fetal position when she was stabbed and that the handcuffs had been applied while she was still alive.
His examination also found no alcohol in her system, contradicting the defense’s account of an evening spent drinking wine. Data obtained from Tinder further showed that Jason had not received a single notification from the app that day. Jason Chen did not testify during the trial.
The defense also questioned the condition of the crime scene, pointing out that Catrina had entered and removed items from the apartment multiple times before it was formally processed, and that furniture had been moved.
In closing arguments, the prosecution tied together the surveillance timeline and witness accounts, noting that Courtney had heard footsteps near the door at 2:11 a.m., just seven minutes before Jasmine’s phone sent its location to her mother at 2:18 a.m. Jurors deliberated for roughly forty-five minutes before returning a verdict of guilty on the charge of first-degree premeditated murder.
During the sentencing phase, Jason Chen’s mother addressed the jury through a translator, asking for mercy on her son’s behalf. His attorney asked jurors to grant him the possibility of parole after serving several decades in prison.
The jury deliberated for less than an hour before finding that the murder involved aggravating factors, including that it was especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel, and that it involved torture beyond what was necessary to cause death. Jason Chen was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Separately, during the trial, the Pace family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Jason Chen’s parents, alleging that they had provided their son with money and information while he was the primary suspect in their daughter’s disappearance.
The years of searching, investigation, and legal proceedings also placed a strain on the family itself, with Travis Pace testifying that his relationship with Catrina had grown difficult in the time since their daughter’s death.
Jasmine Pace was remembered by those who knew her as a devoted aunt to her two nieces and godmother to a young nephew. She was an animal lover who cherished her four cats and had long spoken of wanting children of her own one day.
To her family and close friends, she was known simply as Jazzy, a nickname reflecting the warmth she brought into their lives. Loved ones described her as fiercely protective of the people she cared about and quick to make sure they knew they were valued.
She was remembered as someone who never let a friendship end badly, and whose kindness left a lasting impression on everyone who knew her.
