About two days after Jasmine Pace’s family broke into Jason Chen’s apartment, Chattanooga police investigator Zack Crawford uncovered the largest pool of blood he had ever seen while executing a search warrant there, he testified.
Chen’s first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse trial continued Tuesday in front of Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Boyd Patterson.
He is accused of fatally stabbing his girlfriend, Pace, on Nov. 23, 2022, and disposing of her body in the Tennessee River.
Chen’s defense attorney, Joshua Weiss, told jurors Monday straight out that Chen killed Pace. But he argues it was a heated, intoxicated crime of passion rather than premeditation.
The trial has garnered national media attention from being featured on an episode of the “Dateline: True Crime Weekly” podcast to being branded as the “suitcase by the river” trial by Court TV. The case being so high-profile is part of the reason jurors were brought in from Davidson County and are being sequestered without access to electronics throughout the trial.