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.
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