Talking Dateline: The Pin at Apartment 210

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I'm Dennis Murphy, and you have reached Talking Dateline. And our guest today is Blaine Alexander, my colleague, and she's going to be talking about her most recent episode, which was called The Pin at Apartment 210.
Hey, Blaine, how are you? Dennis, I'm so good. I'm so glad to join you, my friend.
How are you? Good. You know, you had me all the way through, right from the beginning.
I wanted to see what happened next. And boy, once you set those horses running, this is a great story.
Thank you so much. And I want to talk about it, but let's do a little recap first for people who haven't seen it yet.
It's about 22-year-old Jasmine Jazzy Pace. She went missing around Thanksgiving of 2022, and her mom, Katrina, knew that something was terribly wrong.
When authorities weren't giving her the answer she wanted, she took matters into her own hands, even against police recommendations. And for this Talking Dateline, we have an extra clip from an interview with a juror in this case, talking about her experience coming to a verdict back during that emotional trial, and it was.
Okay, so let's dive in and talk Dateline. Blaine, the hardest thing I've always felt in being a Dateline correspondent is sitting in a chair, talking to a family member who has lost someone who was taken in such an ugly fashion way too soon.
Tell me about cousin Jackie. Jackie was incredible.
Jackie is somebody that, I mean, she really was kind of like the heart and soul of our story. She spent a lot of time just kind of talking to us about Jazzy.
The two were very close. I mean, they were very, very close.
And from the very beginning, you kind of noticed that, you know, when they were together, when they were mourning granny, they were the two that said, no, we got to make sure our moms are okay. We've got to do this.
So they were kind of, you know, you have that person in the family that you're like, okay, we're going to take care of things. That was Jackie and Jazzy.
That's kind of the feel I got from them. But what a heaping plateful of grief this family had put on them.
Here was their great-grandmother, very beloved figure in the family. And all of a sudden, they're gathered at her hospital bed saying goodbye.
And then a few days later, Jazzy goes missing. It was unthinkable, Dennis.
I mean, I think that, yes, Granny had cancer.

She was in remission.

They thought she was fine.

And then basically that morning, I mean, it went from, hey, I'm not really feeling that well. Let me go to the hospital to, boom, she's gone.

I mean, it's jarring.

It's kind of whiplash for anybody.

And then, yes, that was the last time that their family saw Jazzy.

You know, they kind of talk about the fact that they're grateful that they were able to gather for Granny because all of the family got to see Jazzy and then she was gone. But later, Jackie told me, you know, when we were talking, she said later they realized we never got a chance to mourn Granny because immediately they were into finding and then mourning Jazzy.
So it really was just a hard time for them and still is. Who did Jazzy turn out to be to you, Blaine, the more you found out about her?

And you guys had remarkable photos. The videos were as good as any collection of gallery of

those kinds of things that I've seen. It really evoked a sense of who she was.

I think so. And I'm glad you felt that too, Dennis, because I think that that was one of

the things that really stood out about this. There were tons of videos about her, right? I mean,

it's 2022, like, you know, she's young. She's very online, if you will, right? And so finding

Thank you. that that was one of the things that really stood out about this.
There were tons of videos about her, right? I mean, it's 2022. She's young.
She's very online, if you will, right? And so finding videos and pictures wasn't a hard thing to come by. She was vivacious.
She was excited about life. I mean, she was kind of in this place where, hey, I'm going to school.
I'm getting my eyes into what I really want to do with my life. She loved people.
She loved her family. And I think that's something that stood out too, because you can think about going off to college, you get kind of absorbed in your friends and your life and, and maybe I'll talk to my mom every three days or whatever.
No, she was very, very close to her family. So that's why they knew immediately when she wasn't answering and things like that, that wasn't like her.
Well, what happened, Blaine? I mean, granny suddenly dies. The family is in grief, and it's about to be Thanksgiving.
When did they start to become alarmed about Jazzy, and where is Jazzy? Different times. And so, for instance, this happened the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
They were all expecting to see her on Thanksgiving, and she didn't come. So, they get some messages from her phone saying, hey, I'm going to go with my friend Emma, you know, out of town with her family.
So that's not like Jazzy. That's very weird.
This was an important family time and Jazzy needed to be at that table. Exactly.
Exactly. But also it was after they realized, okay, no one's talked to her.
She's only been texting us. And so that's when, I mean, to this family's immense credit, that's when their antennas started going up and they said, OK, let's look at her phone records.
Let's call Emma. Let's see what's going on.
And the more and more they started to dig, that's when they realized, no, something's something's wrong. And, you know, I think that this is one thing that the family told us and will tell us they didn't believe that they were getting the help from police that they would have liked to have in those early hours, those early days.
Was that a fair assessment? The cops needed a fire put under them and they weren't getting it? You know, we asked the detective about that. We asked him about that when we had him in the chair.
And basically, he said that they did as they should. He didn't say that they did anything wrong with their response, that they were responsive.
But of course, when it's your loved one that's missing, you want heaven and earth to be moved to find them. I thought it was absolutely fascinating to be witnessing this dialogue in real time between the family members and the police officers with their body cams at the place, at the condo parking lot, I guess, where the vehicle had been ditched.
Sure. You see in real time the grief, their fight to understand what's happening, they need help, they need somebody on their side.

And the cop maybe, you know, justifiably at that point is saying, look, it's the middle of the night, but family really wasn't taking it. You know, I, and I should say Jackie was kind of the spokesperson.
Jackie, Gabby, they spoke. Katrina didn't want to speak with us for this episode, completely understandably.
But my hat's off to her and my heart went out to her because when I saw her in that parking lot and everything that she was just kind of spinning through her mind and let's do this, let's do this, what can we do? I said, that's a mom, right? Like I immediately identified with her because you're thinking through everything, but especially when you think your child is in danger. She said, okay, we can't do this.
Can we get security video? Can we go to these gas stations and ask these people? Can we, I mean, they were asking the security at the apartment, like the way that her mind was thinking under duress, under stress of what can I do next was impressive. I'm not doubt about how they took this whole thing and became their own detectives.
I'm thinking, how did they know how to do that? How did they know how to do this? But this is all about living in the digital world and the footprints we leave around, isn't it? That's exactly it. The first thing that really impressed me was when they had this phone number, right? And they said, okay, who could it be? And Jackie immediately said, well, I'm going to type it into my Cash App, right? Everyone who uses Cash App knows.
You know, I wonder about that. What is Cash App and why would you think to do that first? So Cash App, if I were to send you $50 because you're amazing, I would send it to you.
You absolutely are. You deserve more than 50, by the way.
But I would send you $50 and I'd send it via Cash App, right? I'd say, what's your Cash App? You would probably give me your phone number and I'd put it in and then Dennis Murphy would pop up if you're registered with Cash App. So I could take theoretically any phone number and most people, I think it's safe to say, are on Cash App at this point.

So you can type in their phone number and up pops their Cash App ID.

So that's kind of a very quick way to identify someone.

I mean, in the old days, you would have to, like, look through a phone book, I guess.

I don't know.

Google a phone number, maybe.

Get a goose quill pen out.

Yeah, it was a different era.

Send a carrier pigeon up to the heavens to figure out where it is. But I think that this, you know, Cash App and also Zelle, you could type it into Zelle.
That's, you know, tied to a phone number. So how did that app answer back? What did she learn? So once you put it in, the name Jason Chen popped up.
And that was enough to give them really a thread to start pulling on. And that's kind of what came down to it.
So Jazzy had been hanging out with him, you know, kind of on and off, dating loosely, if you will. They took a trip to Chicago, but her mom knew the name.
And so her mom immediately said, yep, I know who that is. And, you know, was off to the races.
So Jazzy is missing, her car is missing, and they went looking for the vehicle, didn't they? They went looking for the vehicle and they found it. You know, there's one piece that didn't make it into the story, Dennis, that I thought was interesting.
When I was talking to Gabby, Jazzy's half-sister, who was there for the parking lot and going into the apartment, all of that, she told me that when they found the SUV, she looked in the window and she said she noticed that the seat was pushed all the way back. so that indicates that a tall person was driving it.
And she said, Jazzy's short, Jazzy's tiny.

There's no reason that the seat would need to be pushed all the way back.

So she said that was her first indication of, okay, my sister wasn't driving this. How sharp and how observant is Gabby, huh? Very.
Absolutely. And so I think that all of them had their different moments where they realized something's wrong, something's off.
That was Gabby's moment for sure. But then when Katrina, Jazzy's mom, found that pin that she had sent her, I can't imagine anything more heartbreaking than to discover that several days after.
On the timeline of her disappearance, Blaine, when does that happen, this pin drop message? It was at 2.18 in the morning on the Wednesday, early Wednesday morning. So the last time her family saw her was that Tuesday night at the hospital.
And what prosecutors piece together is that after that, she had her long phone call with Jason Chen, eventually goes over to his apartment. And then in the overnight hours, like around the 2 a.m.-ish hour, that's when she sent that pin.
And that was also within three minutes of when Jason Chin's neighbors told the family that they heard a scream come from the apartment. And so you know that something happened in that time frame that Jazzy realized, one, she's in trouble.
I need to call for help. She obviously couldn't do much, but the best she could do was send a pin.
And it's something you can do on an Apple Watch too, even if you don't have your phone beside you. So somehow she was able to send off a pen.
I want to say something about the pen, too, because I think some viewers may wonder, like, how did you not see that? How did you not see this text from your daughter? Yeah, I would wonder that. One, it came in the wee morning hours.
But two, remember, this happened after Granny died, the person who raised her. So Katrina was getting this kind of deluge of all of these sympathetic texts.

Oh, my God, I'm so sorry.

You know, what can I do for you?

All these texts are coming through.

And so Jazzy's texts got lost in there.

That's kind of how Jackie explained it to me.

Terrible for Katrina to realize later that she missed it.

But that's kind of what happened there.

So the pen, she sees the pen.

They're like, oh, my gosh, let's follow this pen.

It takes them to the apartments and specifically in front of apartment 210.

Blaine, we're going to pause for a moment, but when we come back, we're going to hear an extra bit of sound from that juror who will tell us about what was going through their minds with this decision they had to make about premeditation. Sounds good.
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To listen to After the Verdict, subscribe to Dateline Premium on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at datelinepremium.com. So now the family is armed with this pin that takes them right to the front of the door of 210 and the neighbors that say they heard something so who lives who lives in 210 blaine jason chen that's what they find out jason chen lives inside that apartment somebody gets the bright idea to go back out to the car find their credit card and do a break-in and get into apartment 210 and i have to say dennis if I ever needed to get into an apartment or a locked door, I wouldn't know what to do.
Would you naturally know to just get a credit card and pop the lock? I'm one who doesn't know what Cash App is, so no. There you go.
I mean, I've seen it, you know, that you're supposed to be able to burgle a door with a credit card, but that they have the knowledge and the foresight and the guts to go ahead and charging into this thing.

It's just.

Yeah.

I mean, even if I'd seen it on like a TV show, I wouldn't have known how to take the credit card and actually Jimmy the Locko.

What did they find inside?

The first thing that the family saw was Jazzy's overnight bag.

And so that was to them saying, OK, she's been here.

I know my daughter's bag.

That's her bag.

That was number one.

They found a driver's license.

They found several credit cards.

And then they said they found a series of other cell phones, just a bunch of cell phones. All of that made them say there's something going on here.
And they called police. You know, the police take that.
They obviously turn it over to the detectives, but they also say to the family, don't do this again. You can't go inside this apartment.
Don't go back inside. Now, once police got involved and they ended up going into the apartment, that's where they really did the real police work, right? I mean, they obviously were going around seeing, I talked to the detective, and he saw that heel print where it looked like someone was wearing socks, stepped in blood, and then left kind of like a transfer from the sock print, just a little bit.
But it was enough for him to say, okay, we need to get crime scene in here now. And maybe we should say, Blaine, while there's criticism that they were slow in getting up to speed, once they had reason for their authority, they did very, very well at this thing.
They did. That's when they bring in the crime scene investigators to come in and they spray.
They basically have a chemical that reacts when there's the presence of blood. And so they sprayed it on the floor just to see, is there any more blood? And that's when they said about a third of the floor lit up, which is stunning.
There was blood in almost every corner of the apartment, as the detective said to me. He said that there was blood on the bathroom floors, blood on the main area floors, but also there was blood splatter kind of on the wall.
So he said that indicates obviously something very violent, right? And there's an unforgettable soundbite from your officer, which is, we have now gone past a missing persons investigation. This is a homicide.
How chilling is that? This is a homicide. They said that when they saw that, they said that whatever happened, there's no way that whoever was the victim could have survived that because of just how much blood there was.
And so, yes, it's a very unusual place for detectives to be in. There was no body.
There was no suspect there. No one had confessed.
But they knew just from the sheer amount of blood that had been lost that they were dealing with a death, a homicide. So the question then, I guess, is Jason, where is he? That's exactly it.
Give me a quick thumbnail of who Jason is. What's the little biography? So Jason Chen is son of Chinese immigrants.
He was somebody who was at University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, student there, been there for a couple of years. And he was a comp sci major, computer science.
And so this is somebody who obviously knows their way around phones, technology. He, meanwhile, has ended up back at his parents where the cops do a knock, knock, knock, and there's Jason.
They knock. And it's, you know, it's just outside of Nashville.
Parents come down first, according to the detective. And essentially, you know, they kind of talk to him.
And finally, Jason comes down and, you know, says, hey, here I am. And the other thing is they took him back.
They had some warrants to, you know, get like DNA, just different things that they could get from him and then ultimately issued the arrest warrants. At that point, is he giving anything up? No.
Police never did an interview with him because he didn't, you know, he refused to talk and refused to give any sort of information. But the phone told the story, didn't it? The phone told the story.
And I think that it's, again, without these kind of digital pieces, he very likely wouldn't have been arrested. And it takes a while for a case to get to court.
I think people maybe don't understand that it's often two years from the time that a story is in the newspapers to when it's actually before a judge and a jury. Yes.
And it took fully that long to get this case into court. It did.
I'm wondering, Blaine, about this whole notion of pre-child rulings about what the jury can hear about the evidence. And this is this whole thing of, you know, that maybe the family jumped the gun by going into the apartment before the authorities.
And is everything going to get thrown out? Do you have any insight on how that all went? Well, it was kind of a double-edged sword, because that's the first thing that Jason Chen's attorney went after. He doesn't believe that should be admitted.
From the prosecution side, you know, I asked District Attorney General Cody Womp. She said, listen, there is no question that that was crucial, what the family found.
But on the other side of that, yes, that did kind of make things more, I don't know, vulnerable if it wasn't admitted. So there were a lot of hearings back and forth on that.
Ultimately, the judge did decide to admit it. And the prosecution was off to the races after that.
And of course, the defense attorney surprised everyone in the courtroom, right? And it's very opening. He gave it up.
What did he say? He is guilty, but he's not guilty of specifically what you're saying. And so I think the question was never, did Jason Chin end the life of Jasmine Pace, right? The defense attorney said that from jump.
More so, what were the circumstances that led to that? Was it premeditated as the prosecution was arguing? So the defense strategy, I guess, is let's go for a lesser here.

We do not want a conviction on murder one premeditated.

Maybe we can argue it all the way down to manslaughter.

That's exactly it.

That's what he was trying to do.

The story that the defense wove was that there was an argument that was sparked because Jazzy heard the phone ding, and it was Tinder, basically, him talking to other women, according to the defense, that she got upset that they fought, there was broken glass, and she came at him with broken glass, and that he had no choice but to defend himself. And Blaine, this is very often a difficult concept for jurors to get their heads around.
What is premeditation? How long do you need to plan your action to realize, I know what I'm going to do is wrong. I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway.
Is that in an instant? Does it take minutes? Jurors seem to want to put premeditation on a timeline, and it's not an easy concept. It's not.
And I think the prosecution kind of had this burden of saying, here's what this is. It doesn't necessarily mean that you sat and thought for weeks and planned this out and wrote out every detail, but it more so means that in some way you had foresight, right? That you thought about this and before committing this crime.
And so that was the argument that they were trying to make. Blaine, you had a chance to talk to at least one juror after the trial.
And the issue was, what were you guys going through? Take me into the room. And it was juror number 11, a woman named Sarah.
Let's listen to a little of that and see what she has to say. It came down to premeditation, which that all the way up to the very end, the very ending closing statement from D.A.
Moyle or General Moyle. And I think, I know for sure, that red light analogy that Moyle gave is what really helped me understand the premeditation side of it.
And it's that essentially, we've all been faced with this choice when we're driving a car

and you come to a yellow light, you can either step on the gas and go through it or step on the brake and stop. And that there's so many factors that go into that.
You're taking on other traffic coming by, they're considering other people walking, is there, are you late? We have all of these things that go through our mind in a split second to decide to go through it or hit the break. And that's all it takes is a split second to decide.
And just, you know, just like making that quick decision to stop at a yellow light. It's, you know, that really was what helped me solidify.
Like there was so many opportunities to stop. I'm always struck that jurors don't get a manual on how to be a jury.
Especially, Dennis, when you're kind of confronted with legal terms, right? Like premeditation and things like that that you have to sort through. I thought that that was a fascinating way to look at it of, yes, everyone has been in a car where you get to a yellow light and it's like, do I gun it and keep going? Do I slam on the brakes? What do I do? And so that's really kind of a way to think about it there.
And again, I think the sheer number of wounds really also kind of helped nudge it into the

premeditation column because, yes, you could get to 25 stabs. Let me stop.
You know what I mean?

There are many chances to kind of to make a different decision.

How long was the jury out, Blaine? Not long, I don't think.

Less than an hour.

Wow.

40-something minutes. I mean, really very quickly.
It was a very quick conviction there. Any reaction from him in the courtroom? None.
He was, everybody that I've spoken to says that he was very kind of stone-faced. He would look down, according to the prosecution.
It looked like he was looking down, but there was a monitor that showed some of the evidence. So he was looking at that.
The only reaction from my understanding of talking to people who were there that he showed was when his family or his mother was mentioned. His mother took the stand during the sentencing phase and basically kind of pleaded for leniency for her son.
That didn't happen. But he did show some reaction when she spoke and then also when cousin Jackie said, another victim here is your mom.
Jackie's statement, victim impact statement was very moving. She took a glass jar and we kind of showed it in the episode, but you don't get the full effect.
She took a glass jar and she took 60 stones and one by one put them in the jar. And that represented each one of the stab wounds that Jazzy had, just to show the sheer amount of times that he stabbed her, right? And then she began her statement.
So to do that silently and then kind of begin her statement was really powerful. Up next, we're going to take some of your questions to us from social media.
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on NBC. Blaine, good old Analog Murphy here thinks about the letters we get from our viewers.
Of course, they're not letters. People are commenting very often when your story runs about what they thought.
We've called out a few reactions to your story. Do you want to go through them and tell me what your take is on it? I would love it.
We heard from Dateline viewer Valeria Lynn Smith-Bowen. She wrote us, I would have done exactly what her mom and family did.
Yes. I don't think that there's a parent in the world that would disagree with that.
That, you know, hey, my child is missing. What do I need to do? Doesn't matter what I'm doing.
I'm going to do it to find them. Absolutely.
And then there was Jude Marie Goudreau. I hope I'm getting the pronunciation right.

She says, I bet her mom thinks about that pin every single day. My heart goes out to her.
That's what's so sad. That they missed it or the implication that they missed it.
That she missed it, right? And you have to think, even as a parent going through something like this, or anyone loses a love when you think a billion what ifs. but when you have something that is that strong of a what-if, of a possibility, that has to be just devastating for her, truly.
Another viewer, two more perfect, went back to that apartment building when the scream was heard. Why would you write down the scream time, but you don't call the police? That's exactly what Cousin Jackie said to me.
If it was startling enough to you to make you write down the time, but not call for help, you wonder where that decision was made, why that decision was made. We weren't able to speak to them, but that is certainly a good question that the family has and that I had it as well.
Paulette Haywood asked something I always ask when we finish these stories. It's not that difficult to answer the who question.

The why question is much more difficult.

And Paulette says, what on earth was the motive?

Blaine, what do you think?

That is the biggest piece of all of this, Dennis.

I mean, there wasn't one.

I think that when we do stories and it's like, oh, husband catches wife cheating on him and he goes crazy and kills her. Oh, someone wanted insurance money.
And so they do it for that or whatever it may be. At least you can kind of wrap your head around this.
I mean, for all intents and purposes, the prosecution said the same thing. It seemed that he just wanted to kill her.
That's that's all that it was. Which is not a satisfying answer, is it? It's a terrifying answer because there's not a, you think about people that you meet just in general, right? You meet tons of new people every day and you don't know what's going on in their mind.
You don't know what's going on behind their kind of normal facade of being a student and a comp sci major, whatever it may be. And this is one of those terrifying examples.
We didn't talk about it, but apparently in the apartment or at his parents' home, found a bunch of Post-its, notes to self about his timeline and keeping his story straight. Yes.
It seemed like he was, according to detectives, it seemed like he was trying to work out his alibi. And so would write, okay, last talk to her this day, or just different things, or if police come, what to say to parents, or those types of things that he was kind of jotting down notes of how to keep an alibi straight.
And he did everything wrong if the subject was how to get away with murder. That's exactly it, because he did not.
Finally, Blaine, we heard from Stephen with a PH. I like that.
Tonight's Dateline at 10 is a case that happened right here. He's shocked that he's watching his TV set, and there's streets that he knows, and people that he knows he knows and institutions and it's on his TV set.
It brings it home in a way that's kind of shocking for him. That's really interesting when we have viewers who are very familiar with either the story, the crime itself, or certainly the place where it happened, right? Because for most of our viewers, it's some place that, you know, maybe they know they've traveled to, but yes, when it's your city, when it's your street, you can kind of see these things on local news, perhaps.
I know that this was a case that was covered locally. But I know that in the way that we do this, trying to really humanize the victim and tell more about the person who was taken away, I think sets our stories apart.
So hopefully, even if he had seen kind of like different coverage, hopefully he learned more about who Jasmine Pace was through our story. Well, Blaine, congratulations.
You and your team did a remarkable job in pulling this whole thing together and telling us who the victim was, which is so important, the person that we lost here. Thank you so much, Dennis.
It was truly an honor to get to know her and know her through her family and friends and learn more about her. And with that, Blaine, we'll put a button on this edition of Talking Dateline.
If you have any questions for us about stories you've seen on

Dateline, you can reach us 24-7 on social media at Dateline NBC. So that's it for right now.
We'll

see you again on Friday, of course, as always on Dateline. And thanks for joining us, Blaine.