Episode 121: Aniah Blanchard – Bite-Sized Crime

When a young woman disappears in the middle of the night, investigators must retrace her steps to find the truth. What happened to Aniah?

Episode Media

Important locations in the search for Aniah *(Google Maps)*

Aniah seen on camera at the Chevron gas station on October 23, 2019 *(Auburn Police Division)*

Suspect believed to be Ibraheem Yazeed at the Chevron gas station on October 23, 2019 *(Auburn Police Division)*

Ibraheem Yazeed *(Auburn Police Division)*

Episode Sources

Episode Transcript

Welcome back to Bite-Sized Crime. This week I’m bringing you a case that feels like the epitome of what we often fear – a chance encounter that leads to tragedy. This episode discusses sensitive topics, so listener discretion is advised.

Aniah Haley Blanchard grew up in Homewood, Alabama, an affluent suburb of Birmingham. The second oldest in a big, blended family, Aniah was bright and bubbly. Her father Elijah told CBS42, “Aniah is the type of person who brings light to a dark room. She never met a stranger.”

Aniah was also ambitious and determined. She played softball at Homewood High School and even considered playing at the collegiate level, but she decided that she wanted to focus on her studies instead. Aniah had dreams of becoming a teacher and sharing her love of softball through coaching. After graduating in the spring of 2018, Aniah enrolled at Southern Union State Community College. The campus in Auburn, Alabama, was just a few hours away from home, and Aniah kept in regular contact with her family.

In the fall of 2019, Aniah was settling into her second year of college, sharing an apartment in Auburn with her friend Sarah and her rescue dog Bloo. Her older brother Elijah, a junior at Auburn University, lived just 10 minutes down the road. Only 17 months apart in age, Aniah and Elijah were as close as twins. It was comforting to know that even as they grew older and forged their own paths in life, they had each other to lean on.

On Wednesday, October 23, Aniah and Elijah drove together to the town of Winfield, to meet up with their mom Angela for a family funeral. After the service, Angela stayed in Winfield, but Aniah and Elijah needed to get home. On the way back to Auburn, they stopped in Homewood to see their stepfather, Walt, and their two younger siblings. Angela had married Walt Harris, a UFC heavyweight fighter, when Aniah and Elijah were young, and he was a big part of their lives.

After spending some time with the family, Aniah and Elijah got back on the road. They made it back to Auburn around 11pm, and Aniah dropped her brother off at his house. She told him that she still had a lot of energy to burn off and that she might go out again, but Elijah reminded her that she had to work the next day and encouraged her to go home and sleep. Aniah said she would, and the two agreed to talk the next day.

Shortly after 11, Aniah got a message from her roommate Sarah, asking if she was almost home. Aniah replied that she was. But the minutes ticked by, and Aniah didn’t show up. Worried, Sarah messaged Aniah again, asking if she had decided to go out instead of coming home. Aniah responded that she had gone out with a man named Eric, someone she had just met. When Sarah checked Aniah’s phone location, she saw that it was near an apartment complex. She figured that Aniah must be hanging out with some other college students, so she decided not to wait up. She would see Aniah in the morning.

But when morning came, Aniah still wasn’t home, and she wasn’t answering her messages. Concerned, Sarah reached out to Elijah, since he was the last one to see Aniah. But Elijah was under the impression that his sister had gone straight home after dropping him off the night before. He started calling around, hoping that someone knew where Aniah was. But when he called her employer and learned that she hadn’t shown up for work that morning, he knew something was wrong.

Aniah worked as a babysitter for a local family, and the fact that she hadn’t picked up the children as usual was a major red flag. Aniah was consistent and reliable; it was completely out of character for her to drop the ball on something so important. If something had come up, she would have called to let someone know.

Elijah called his mom and stepdad and told them that Aniah was missing. Angela and Walt immediately made the two-hour drive from Homewood to Auburn and filed a missing persons report with the Auburn Police Division. They told detectives that it wasn’t like Aniah to stop communicating with friends and family. She wasn’t the type of person to shirk her responsibilities, and she would never leave her dog Bloo without making sure someone was taking care of him.

The Auburn PD opened an investigation right away, issuing a Be On the Lookout for Aniah’s black Honda CR-V. In a press release, Auburn Police Chief Paul Register asked the public to call in with any information about Aniah’s disappearance or any sightings of her vehicle.

The next day – Friday, October 25th – police announced that they had found Aniah’s car abandoned at an apartment complex in Montgomery, nearly 60 miles west of where she had last been seen. There was significant damage to the front end of the vehicle, suggesting that it may have been involved in a collision. But what was found inside the vehicle was even more concerning – large amounts of blood in the passenger seat. Court documents later described it as, “indicative of someone suffering a life-threatening injury.”

As crime scene investigators processed the vehicle, they discovered a bullet hole in the passenger side door and shell casings in the cup holder. The smell of bleach lingered in the air, but if someone had tried to clean up, they hadn’t done a very good job. It was becoming increasingly clear to investigators that Aniah had been a victim of foul play.

Chief Register told WSFA that the Auburn Police Division was working with multiple agencies on Aniah’s case, and they were focusing on the area between Auburn and Montgomery. “We would just ask anybody that saw her car, anybody resembling her or even her information, please reach out to the… Montgomery Police Department.”

Aniah’s family members were also making pleas to the public. Her father Elijah told the Montgomery Advocate that he still had hope that his daughter would be found, but they needed help. “If you have seen her, say something. If you saw the car on the side of the road, we hope that you say something… That’s not only for my daughter, but all of the young ladies and children who have been abducted.”

By October 30th, a task force had been formed. Local agencies such as the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences and the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department worked alongside agents from the FBI, the U.S. Marshal Service, and the Department of Homeland Security. Their primary focus was to find Aniah.

Investigators started putting together a timeline of Aniah’s last movements on the night of October 23rd. Elijah was the last person to see her when she dropped him off at his home in Auburn around 11pm. At 11:09, she messaged her roommate Sarah that she was almost home. At 11:21, Aniah’s debit card was used at a gas station convenience store on South College Street. At 11:38, Sarah messaged Aniah, asking where she was. Two minutes later, Aniah responded, saying that she was going out with someone named Eric. By 11:47, Aniah’s phone had either run out of battery or had been turned off.

Investigators zeroed in on the debit card transaction and were able to get surveillance footage from the convenience store. They spotted Aniah entering the store wearing the same clothes her brother had last seen her in – a black and white dress, black tights, and tan boots. Aniah purchased a bag of potato chips and left the store. Unfortunately, the gas station didn’t have security cameras outside, so investigators couldn’t see what happened after she left. But it was proof that Aniah had still been alive at 11:21pm.

Now there was the question of where Aniah had gone after leaving the store. Sarah had received a message from Aniah saying she was going out with some guy she’d just met, but Aniah’s family wasn’t sure this was true. It wasn’t like her to meet up with strangers, especially in the middle of the night after a long day of traveling and knowing she had to work the next day. Had that last message truly been from Aniah, or was it just a red herring?

Using Aniah’s phone records, investigators were able to track her next movements. A witness had spotted her Honda CR-V leaving the gas station and heading south, away from town. Aniah’s location data confirmed this; the phone, presumably still in Aniah’s car, traveled down South College Street for a few miles. It then made a big circle, heading west on Longleaf Drive, north on Cox Road, and east on Lee Road 137. It then came south again, ending up back at the gas station intersection. This time, it headed north on South College Street for a short distance and stopped near the Clarion Inn, a two-star hotel just a few hundred feet from the gas station. It was there that Aniah’s phone went dark at 11:47pm.

Less than an hour later, at 12:30am, Aniah’s car was caught on camera as it passed by a tag reader near Interstate 85, heading southwest towards Montgomery. It would be found at the Parks Place apartment complex two days later.

Investigators went back to the surveillance footage from the convenience store, believing that it could hold the key to finding Aniah. This time, they focused specifically on the other patrons and noticed two men entering the convenience store around the same time Aniah did. One of the men, wearing a denim jacket, didn’t interact with Aniah at all, simply purchased his items and left. The other man, however, wearing dark pants and a camouflage hoodie, grabbed an alcoholic beverage and took it to the counter. As he waited for the cashier to hand over his change, the man looked over his shoulder and watched as Aniah left the store. He then took his change and followed directly behind her.

To investigators, this was a major development. They needed to identify these two men and see what, if anything, they knew.

They were able to track down the man in the denim jacket fairly quickly. The man told investigators that he had noticed Aniah and the other man inside the convenience store, but it was what he witnessed outside the store that turned the case on its head. He said that he had seen Aniah and the man in the camouflage hoodie standing outside her Honda CR-V when suddenly the man grabbed Aniah and forced her into the car. The witness told investigators that it was clear Aniah was going with the man against her will. However, the witness didn’t do anything in the moment, perhaps out of shock or disbelief over what he was seeing. Instead, he went back to his hotel and told his girlfriend what had just happened. She told him that it was none of his business – he needed to stay out of it. Now, weeks later, the man broke down in front of investigators, brought to tears by his own inaction and feelings of guilt.

Investigators knew they didn’t have time to waste – they had to find the man in the camouflage hoodie. The witness had told them that he had also seen the man hanging around his hotel, the Clarion Inn, but he didn’t know his name. The Auburn Police Division released grainy images from the surveillance video to the media, asking the public for help identifying their primary suspect. Before long, they had a name: Ibraheem Yazeed.

Twenty-nine-year-old Yazeed had a long history of violent criminal behavior. In 2011, he was charged with robbing someone at gunpoint. In 2012, he was charged with attempted murder of a police officer after ramming his vehicle into a patrol car. In 2017, he was arrested for assaulting another police officer. But for some reason, none of these charges stuck, and Yazeed went on to commit even more crimes without facing the consequences.

In January of 2019, just nine months before Aniah disappeared, Yazeed was charged in Montgomery with robbing and kidnapping a man while also beating another man nearly to death. Somehow, Yazeed – a violent and dangerous criminal – was let out on bond. It was while he was out that investigators believe he encountered Aniah at the convenience store that fateful night.

On November 7th, the Auburn Police Division announced a warrant for the arrest of Ibraheem Yazeed. He was being charged with first-degree kidnapping and was considered armed and dangerous. Thankfully, it was only a few hours before a tipster led the U.S. Marshals to Pensacola, Florida, just over the Alabama state line. After a brief foot chase through the woods, agents arrested Yazeed and booked him into the Escambia County Jail. He was then extradited back to Alabama and held without bond.

Although Yazeed was in jail, investigators needed more evidence of his involvement in Aniah’s disappearance if they wanted to make the charges stick. They went back to Aniah’s phone data and noticed that after leaving the convenience store and heading south, it had briefly stopped at a different gas station just half a mile away. When investigators checked the surveillance footage, they saw Aniah’s vehicle pull up to a gas pump. Yazeed gets out of the passenger seat, walks up to the small convenience store window, then turns around and gets back in the car. Here was proof that Yazeed had been in Aniah’s car on the night of October 23rd. But was it enough to prove he had kidnapped her?

Earlier in the investigation, law enforcement had begun using Verus, a new technology powered by artificial intelligence that is able to monitor phone calls made by inmates. While the calls are already recorded and monitored for safety reasons, Verus can detect certain keywords in conversations and alert law enforcement when those words are used. In Aniah’s case, investigators requested to use Verus in the Montgomery City Jail, hoping to find new leads. And it worked.

On November 11th, investigators were alerted to a phone call involving an inmate named Antwain Fisher. During a conversation with someone outside the jail, Fisher implicated himself and another person in Aniah’s disappearance, going so far as to place himself in Aniah’s vehicle. He provided details in the call that only someone involved would know.

When Fisher got out of jail in mid-November, Auburn police arrested him and charged him with first-degree kidnapping. Faced with a heavy sentence, Fisher started to talk. He told investigators that around 5am on October 24th, Ibraheem Yazeed showed up at the house where he was staying in Montgomery. Yazeed told Fisher that he needed gas for the car he was driving – a black Honda CR-V. Fisher drove Yazeed to a nearby gas station where they filled up a gas can and then returned to the house. With the CR-V now gassed up, Yazeed asked Fisher to follow him to the Parks Place apartment complex. There, they dumped the CR-V and headed back to the house again in Fisher’s truck. Fisher said that Yazeed left after that, but returned a short while later, this time to ask for another favor.

According to Fisher, Yazeed said he needed to pick something up and asked Fisher to give him a ride. They headed north on Interstate 85 and stopped in a different part of Montgomery. Fisher told investigators that Yazeed got out of the pickup truck to get whatever item he was looking for. Fisher heard a thud coming from the back of the truck, and when he asked Yazeed what it was, Yazeed said it was a gun.

The pair got back on the interstate, Yazeed at the wheel. He drove them to Shorter, a small rural town about 25 miles outside of Montgomery. He pulled off the side of a dirt road and parked the truck across from a church cemetery. Fisher watched in the rearview mirror as Yazeed went to the back of the truck and dragged a large, heavy object from the bed. He told investigators that whatever it was was wrapped in a comforter, and he thought he saw legs sticking out. When Yazeed got back in the truck, Fisher asked him if it was a body, but Yazeed wouldn’t say. He simply told him not to worry, that it wouldn’t come back on him or his family. After that, the men drove back to Montgomery and Yazeed left.

With this new information, investigators sent search teams to the town of Shorter. On November 25th, in the woods off County Road 2, across from a little country church, searchers found human remains. The clothing matched what Aniah had been wearing on the night she disappeared. An autopsy would later reveal that Aniah had died from a single gunshot wound to the head.

Aniah’s family was devastated by the news. They had been holding out hope that she would be found alive, that she would come home to them. At a candlelight vigil, her mother Angela told the gathered crowd, “My life’s never going to be the same again without her… She made life better for all of us.”

Not long after Aniah’s remains were found, police announced the arrest of two more individuals. David Johnson Jr. was charged with hindering prosecution for his role in driving Yazeed across state lines into Florida while he was evading arrest. His father, David Johnson Sr., was also charged with hindering prosecution for lying to police about his son’s and Yazeed’s whereabouts. Both men’s charges were later dismissed.

Antwain Fisher’s charge of first-degree kidnapping was also dismissed. The District Attorney released a statement saying that Fisher’s actions did not meet the requirements of Alabama law for accomplice liability. Instead, the DA’s office would be focusing their investigation on Ibraheem Yazeed.

In December of 2019, Yazeed was officially charged with two counts of capital murder for the death of Aniah Blanchard, and the District Attorney announced they would be seeking the death penalty. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 delayed the case, and as of this recording, Ibraheem Yazeed is still sitting in jail awaiting trial. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and maintains his innocence, saying that there is no evidence connecting him to Aniah’s death.

If there can be a silver lining to a case such as this one, it might be found in Aniah’s family and their determination to find hope in the midst of tragedy. In the years since Aniah’s death, they have worked tirelessly to advocate for victims of violent crimes. In November of 2022, a bill reforming the bail system in Alabama was voted into law. Under Aniah’s Law, anyone charged with a Class A felony – such as kidnapping, rape, or murder – can be denied bail by a judge. Advocates of the law believe that if Ibraheem Yazeed had not been out on bail in October of 2019, Aniah Blanchard would still be alive.

Angela and Walt Harris have also started a foundation in Aniah’s name – called Aniah’s Heart after the 19-year-old’s heart of gold. The nonprofit provides free self-defense classes and gives resources to victims’ families. Angela told AL.com, “I feel like I would be letting her down if I didn’t do anything. I feel like I can hear Aniah saying, ‘Mom, you’ve got to do this.’”

Aniah Blanchard was a bright young woman with her whole future ahead of her. Tragically, her life was cut short in a chance encounter with a violent predator. But although he took her life, he did not take her memory or her legacy. She will be remembered by all those who loved her.