Episode 123: Zion Foster – Bite-Sized Crime

When a teenage girl doesn’t return home one night, the last person to see her has quite a story to tell. What happened to Zion Foster?

Episode Media

Zion and her mother Ciera *(Dateline NBC)*

Jaylin Brazier in court *(Detroit News)*

Parking lot in Highland Park where Jaylin took Zion’s body *(Google Maps)*

Crews searching the Pine Tree Acres landfill *(Detroit News)*

Episode Sources

Episode Transcript

Welcome back to Bite-Sized Crime. This week I’m bringing you a tragic case of broken trust and a family’s quest for justice. This episode discusses sensitive topics, so listener discretion is advised.

Around 10:00 on the evening of January 4, 2022, 17-year-old Zion Rachelle Foster was finishing up her shift at work and waiting for her ride to show up. A junior at Eastpointe High School in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, Zion had started working at Detroit Wing Company, a local restaurant, just a few months earlier. Her mother Ciera told Dateline that Zion was really enjoying the experience of having her first job. “You know, she was starting to make friends, she was making money. And she was super excited to be able to do things for herself, or purchase things for her siblings.”

Zion was the oldest of Ciera’s six children and took that role very seriously. She was always looking out for her younger siblings, and they adored her in return. Zion was kind and encouraging, and her bright personality set the tone for the entire family.

Zion was also creative and quite talented. According to her mother, she could draw and sing, and she played multiple instruments. Zion had big dreams for the future, and she was looking forward to graduation and life beyond.

Now, as Zion stood outside the restaurant and waited for Ciera’s boyfriend to come pick her up, she was looking forward to a quiet evening with her family. As soon as she got home, Zion and her siblings crowded into their mother’s room for some late-night quality time. Ciera told Dateline, “We were having our little pow-wow, like we normally do. Some jokes, talking about the day and things like that.”

But after a short while, Zion asked her mom if she could go hang out with her cousin Jaylin. School hadn’t started yet after the winter holidays, so Zion wouldn’t have to be up early the next morning. Ciera gave her daughter permission and told her to text when she was on her way home.

Around 10:45, Jaylin’s white Acura sedan pulled up to the house. Still in her work uniform, Zion grabbed her purse and phone and headed out the door, forgoing a jacket despite the cold winter air. Ciera got the rest of her children ready for bed and settled in to wait for her eldest to come home.

At 12:59am, Ciera got a text from Zion saying she was on her way home. But twenty minutes later, Zion still hadn’t shown up. When Ciera tried to track her daughter’s location as she often did, she was surprised to discover that Zion’s phone had been turned off. The last location it pinged from was near Greenfield Road and the James Couzens Freeway, right near where Jaylin lived. Why would Zion say she was coming home and then turn her phone off? She should have been back by now.

Hours passed, and Ciera anxiously waited for Zion to walk through the door and apologize for running late. But it didn’t happen. All of Ciera’s calls to Zion’s phone went straight to voicemail, and it was becoming increasingly clear that something had happened to prevent her daughter from coming home.

When morning arrived, Ciera contacted the Eastpointe Police Department and reported Zion missing. She worried that the police would dismiss Zion as a runaway, but they agreed to take the report and pass it on to detectives. Of course, Ciera wasn’t going to sit around and wait. She immediately started hanging flyers around town and contacting local news outlets, determined to get Zion’s name out there.

Perhaps most importantly, Ciera contacted the last person to see Zion – her cousin Jaylin.

Twenty-one year old Jaylin Brazier was actually Ciera’s ex-husband’s cousin, but he and Zion were close in age and had always hung out together. So Ciera was shocked when Jaylin told her that he hadn’t seen Zion the night she disappeared; in fact, he hadn’t seen her in years.

Jaylin’s obvious lie took Ciera aback. She had seen Jaylin’s car pull up to the house, had even spoken to him and given him a hug. She had watched Zion get into the car and drive away. Why was he suddenly acting as if none of that had happened?

Jaylin told Ciera that she could check his security cameras if she wanted, and that he would be glad to help her search for Zion. He would even hang flyers around his neighborhood. But he maintained that he had no idea where she was.

Meanwhile, detectives were doing their due diligence and reaching out to those closest to Ciera, including her boyfriend, Vertez Gonzalez.

According to Vertez, he had talked to Zion on the phone the night of January 4th after she got off work. She told him that she was going to hang out with her favorite cousin, and this concerned Vertez. He didn’t like Jaylin and worried about Zion’s relationship with him.

When Vertez checked Zion’s location, he found the same thing her mother had – Zion’s phone was near Greenfield Road. But when he tried to call her a few hours later, it went directly to voicemail. Assuming that she had let her battery die, Vertez sent her a few more messages and then went to sleep. When he awoke the next morning and checked Zion’s location, he saw that her phone was still off.

Vertez reached out to Zion’s brother to see if she was home, but he was surprised to learn that she still hadn’t shown up. He decided to just call Jaylin and see what was going on. But just like he had told Ciera, Jaylin told Vertez that he hadn’t seen Zion in ages. The location where her phone had pinged wasn’t anywhere near his house; she must have been doing something else in that area.

By now, detectives were seeing a pattern. Jaylin Brazier had to be hiding something. Why else would he be denying the fact that Zion had been with him the night she disappeared?

On January 6th, two officers from the Detroit Police Department arrived at Jaylin’s home in Greenfield. He told them the same thing he had told everyone else – he hadn’t seen Zion on January 4th and had no idea where she was. He specifically said that he hadn’t seen her since May of 2021, and that her phone location didn’t show her at his house, but at a duplex across the street. With Jaylin’s permission, the officers entered the house and did a cursory search of the premises, but they didn’t find anything of significance, nothing that indicated Zion had been there.

The next day, the lead detective on Zion’s case – Eastpointe Police Detective Ian Reinhold – spoke with Jaylin by phone and was told the same story: He hadn’t seen Zion in months. This time, he said that Zion had gone missing before and that she had “used his house as an excuse” so her family wouldn’t find her. But Zion’s family denied this – anytime she had left home, she had stayed with a friend and remained in contact with them the entire time.

Jaylin told Detective Reinhold that he would come into the police station to talk in person and would submit to a polygraph, but when the time came, he didn’t show up. It was beginning to look more and more obvious that Jaylin Brazier knew more than he was saying.

In the course of the investigation, detectives were able to obtain video footage from several security cameras. Video from a doorbell camera in Zion’s neighborhood showed a white Acura sedan pull up to Zion’s house at 10:42pm on January 4th. Half an hour later, at 11:14pm, the same car was seen on a doorbell camera across the street from Jaylin’s house in Greenfield. It pulled into the driveway, and two people – presumably Zion and Jaylin – got out of the car and entered the house. The car stayed in the same spot until 1:41am, when one person got in and pulled the car out of the driveway, turned around, then backed in so the rear of the car was closest to the house. The car stayed there for a few minutes before driving off. It didn’t return until 2:15am.

Detectives found this timeline highly suspicious. The video and Zion’s phone data showed that she had arrived at Jaylin’s house, but once her phone was turned off at 1:15am, there was no proof that she had left. They needed to get access to Jaylin’s phone.

With the assistance of the FBI, detectives were able to get a search warrant for Jaylin’s data. A cellular analysis showed that before 11pm on January 4th, Jaylin’s phone traveled to Zion’s house in Eastpointe and back to his own house in Greenfield. At 1:44am on January 5th, after his white car was seen backing up the driveway, Jaylin’s phone left the house and traveled to a parking lot in Highland Park. It stayed there for six minutes before taking the same route back to Jaylin’s house in Greenfield. These times matched up with what detectives had seen on the video footage.

But that wasn’t the only interesting data found by detectives. On January 6th, around 2pm, Jaylin’s phone traveled back to the parking lot in Highland Park, staying only a few minutes. But during that time, the phone’s search history showed two specific questions: “are trash trucks also compactors” and “what is the force of a garbage truck compactor”.

The parking lot in Highland Park was behind a small shopping center adjacent to a homeless shelter. There were no street lights in the lot, but there were several large dumpsters, certainly big enough to hide a body. There was also a security camera which captured footage of Jaylin’s white sedan pulling up to the dumpsters.

On January 17th, officers detained Jaylin Brazier and executed search warrants on his house, car, and cell phone. The phone had been wiped and restored to its factory settings on January 6th, not long after returning to the parking lot in Highland Park.

Crime scene investigators processed the home but did not find any signs of blood or any indication that the house had been cleaned in a way that would hide evidence. The only items of interest were a metal table surrounded by broken glass and what appeared to be a suicide note written on a cardboard box. In the note, Jaylin expressed his love for his family and his children, saying, “I did nothing and in death I stick to that regardless of the lies being made against me… I love you all more than anything in this world and I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to handle this.”

After officers left the scene, Jaylin was released and allowed to return home, but detectives clearly stated that he was considered a person of interest in the case and that they were not giving up the search. In a press conference on January 19th, Detroit Police Chief James White told reporters, “We would like to know if [Brazier] has seen her, or if he has any information that could lead to her whereabouts.”

Later that evening, Jaylin Brazier showed up at the police station and turned himself in for questioning. This time, he deviated from his previous version of events – the one where he claimed he hadn’t seen Zion in years. Instead, he told detectives that he had seen Zion that night. He had picked her up at her house and taken her back to his place. There, they did LSD and smoked weed, something he said they did often. Zion said she was tired and laid down on the couch while he got up to get a drink. According to Jaylin, when he came back into the room, Zion was motionless. He tried to wake her, knowing she had to work in the morning, but she was unresponsive and no longer breathing.

Jaylin told detectives that he freaked out, desperately trying to figure out what to do. In his marijuana-induced haze, he didn’t even consider calling for help. Instead, he decided he had to get rid of Zion’s body. He backed the car into the driveway and put Zion in the trunk, drove to Highland Park, and tossed her body in a dumpster.

On January 22nd, Jaylin Brazier was arrested and charged with lying to investigators. He pleaded no-contest, and at his sentencing hearing, told the judge that he regretted his decisions that night, that he had been stoned and reacted out of fear. The judge admonished Jaylin for his cowardice and said that his sentence needed to reflect the pain and suffering he had caused Zion’s family. “I cannot do anything to remedy what occurred. I am so sorry for what has happened to (the family). But you need to be punished.” The judge sentenced Jaylin to 23 months to 4 years in prison.

But the story does not end here. Detectives were still convinced that Jaylin had murdered Zion, that he was still lying about what happened that night. Unfortunately, they didn’t have enough evidence for a murder charge, and they didn’t have Zion.

In May of 2022, teams from multiple agencies launched an extensive search of the Pine Tree Acres landfill. Dozens of professionals and volunteers worked in the summer heat, combing through the mountain of trash. Sadly, after nearly seven months of searching, there was still no trace of Zion. In October, the search was officially suspended.

In January of 2023, Zion’s family received unwelcome news: Jaylin Brazier had been released from prison. Ciera told Detroit News that she was angered and disappointed by the decision. “It basically is like a slap in the face — especially for him to admit to a lot of what he did and it to be reported on national TV, recorded in court, and he didn’t even get the 23 months… This feels like a failure in the system. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Detectives continued to work to bring homicide charges against Jaylin, in spite of the roadblocks. During a press conference, Chief White told reporters that the case was still open and active. “Our detectives are constitutionally doing everything they can to talk to him, investigate him, visit with him, to make sure that we get what we need to charge that case the way it needs to be charged.”

Finally, in June of 2023, the Wayne County Prosecutor charged Jaylin Brazier with one count of first-degree murder in the death of Zion Foster. It was eventually downgraded to second-degree murder, and the case went to trial in May of 2024.

During opening statements, Assistant Prosecutor Ryan Elsey told the jury that Zion Foster trusted her favorite cousin, and it would prove to be a fatal mistake. “Zion left the defendant’s house that night in the trunk of his car and he threw her body away in a dumpster like she was a piece of garbage.”

Defense attorney Brian Brown painted a different picture – Jaylin was just a frightened young man caught in a difficult situation. “He may not have made the right decision, but at the end of the day that does not make him a murderer. He panicked and he did something he shouldn’t have…”

Over the course of the trial, the prosecution relied heavily on the digital evidence, including the surveillance videos and the data left behind by Jaylin’s and Zion’s cell phones.

According to court records, Jaylin and Zion had exchanged thousands of messages over the years, many of which were sexually explicit and sent when Zion was barely 16 years old. There were also indications that the pair had smoked weed together on multiple occasions, sometimes doing LSD as well.

Jaylin’s ex-girlfriend Katrina testified that she and Jaylin had still been together in January of 2022, and she had been pregnant at the time. She told the court that around 1:30am on January 5th, about 15 minutes after Zion’s phone went dead, she had texted Jaylin from work, saying that she was tired and wanted to lie down. At 2:20am, nearly an hour later and after he had returned home from Highland Park, Jaylin responded to the message, saying that he would come pick her up and bring her home. He also casually mentioned that the cat had scratched his neck when he tried to pet its stomach. When Katrina saw him twenty minutes later, she noticed a large, bloody scratch on his collarbone. She testified that it seemed much deeper than a normal cat scratch, but she didn’t think too much of it at the time.

Katrina also testified that while Jaylin was in prison on the perjury charges, he had sent her several messages, including one saying that he had planned every step and that she should just relax. But Katrina said that he had never confessed anything to her, had never told her what happened that night.

The defense argued that there was no evidence that Jaylin had murdered Zion. In fact, Zion had a seizure disorder and was on several medications for anxiety and depression. It was possible that she had had a bad reaction to the LSD just like Jaylin claimed. There was no blood found in Jaylin’s house or car, and trained cadaver dogs did not find any trace of human remains in either location. Everything the prosecution had was purely circumstantial.

In closing arguments, the defense painted a picture of a terrible accident, a poor decision, and a botched investigation. The prosecution countered with a reminder that Jaylin had been grooming his underage cousin for years. “This tells you what’s on his mind… This tells you what his intentions were when he brought her to his house late at night, behind the back of his pregnant girlfriend… He brought Zion over to his house late that night and she leaves that house in the trunk of his car, on a night where he has an unexplained gash on his neck.”

After less than an hour of deliberations, the jury found Jaylin Brazier guilty of second-degree murder and tampering with evidence. He was sentenced to a minimum of 43 years in prison.

At the sentencing hearing, Zion’s mother Ciera addressed the court. “Zion, the life of the party, she was my first born, my best friend. He stole from me my baby. He stole from me the opportunity to even say goodbye. He stole from me my artist, my architect. He stole from me my singer and my songwriter. He stole from me and he stole from my babies. And he stole from the world what would have been and what should have been a great human being.”

Zion Rachelle Foster was a bright young woman with her whole future ahead of her. Tragically, she put her trust in the wrong person, a person who claimed to care for her, and he chose to take her life. We can only take comfort in the fact that justice was served and hope that one day she will be returned to her family.