Original Episodes
174 – Na’Ziyah Harris
151 – Sunny Sramek
140 – Angela Marisol Diaz
066 – Cecilia Cabrera
104 – Ellen Rae Greenberg
Episode Transcript
Welcome back to Bite-Sized Crime. This week I’m bringing you the latest updates on some cases that I’ve covered in the past. Since the last update episode in September of last year, there has been significant movement in several cases, so I wanted to spend some time updating you on where they are now. I’ll give a quick overview of each case to catch you up to speed, but the original episodes are linked in the show notes if you’d like to go back and re-listen to get all the details.
The first case I’d like to talk about is that of 13-year-old Na’Ziyah Harris, whose case I covered just a few weeks ago in episode 174. On January 9, 2024, Na’Ziyah went to school as usual, taking the bus from her grandmother’s house on the east side of Detroit. Most days, Na’Ziyah arrived back home around 3pm, but that day, she didn’t show up. Her grandmother reported her missing to the school district’s department of public safety, but their investigation led them to believe that Na’Ziyah had simply run away from home. Surveillance cameras from the school bus showed Na’Ziyah getting off at her usual stop, but after that, she vanished.
It wasn’t until a month later that the Detroit Police Department was made aware of Na’Ziyah’s disappearance and officially took over the case. They discovered that Na’Ziyah had been groomed by 41-year-old Jarvis Butts, her cousins’ father. Butts had been abusing Na’Ziyah for years and had been the subject of multiple reports to Children’s Protective Services.
Four months before her disappearance, Na’Ziyah had told Butts she was pregnant, setting off a chain of events outside of her control. Investigators uncovered Butts’ search history from December of 2023, which showed he had been looking for information about at-home abortions, including searches for abortion pills and drinking anti-freeze.
On the day of her disappearance, Na’Ziyah arranged to meet up with Butts after school. Phone records showed that Butts drove Na’Ziyah to his auto shop, then to the neighboring town of Ypsilanti, then back to the shop. Around 9:30pm, he checked in at a hotel off Interstate 94, where he stayed for approximately 3 hours. He then traveled to midtown Detroit where his phone pinged near the Children’s Hospital of Michigan just after 1am. The next evening, Butts’ phone pinged near the River Rouge, the same spot where search teams later located pieces of Na’Ziyah’s clothing.
In September of 2024, Jarvis Butts was arrested and charged with first-degree premeditated murder and second-degree criminal sexual conduct. After a preliminary hearing, the judge determined that the evidence was enough probable cause to warrant a trial.
In February of 2026, Jarvis Butts pleaded guilty to all charges. The court sentenced him to 35-60 years for second-degree murder, 10-15 years on four counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct, and 10-15 years for third-degree criminal sexual conduct, all to be served concurrently. As a part of the plea deal, Butts agreed to provide the location of Na’Ziyah’s remains.
However, on March 26th, just weeks after his sentencing, Jarvis Butts was found dead in his jail cell, presumably a result of suicide.
After the news broke, Na’Ziyah’s cousin Roxy spoke to FOX2, calling Butts a coward who took the easy way out. She said that the family deserved to know the truth so they could bring Na’Ziyah home. “I feel like we still didn’t get answers for Na’Ziyah. I feel like there were still unanswered questions about the case.”
The Detroit Police Department issued a statement, saying, “[We are] aware of the death of Jarvis Butts, who was convicted of killing 13-year-old Na’Ziyah Harris. Although the legal process ended with a conviction in court, our work is not done. Our department will follow all leads for a homicide and continue our efforts to locate the body of Na’Ziyah Harris to help bring closure to her family.”
The next case I’d like to look at is that of 18-year-old Sunny Sramek, whose disappearance I covered in episode 151. In April of 2019, Sunny embarked on a road trip with an acquaintance, 42-year-old Cliff Coates. Coates had invited Sunny to accompany him to pick up his niece in Omaha, 300 miles from their small town of Trenton, Nebraska. The plan was to return the next day, and Sunny told her mom Paula that she would check in regularly.
Sunny left with Coates on the morning of Saturday, April 20th. A few hours later, just before 1pm, Sunny called her mom from Cliff’s cell phone. She said they had made it to the town of Holdredge and would soon be getting on Interstate 80, which would take them all the way into Omaha. Sunny said she would check in again a little bit later, but hours passed without a phone call.
When Paula’s phone finally did ring late that night, it wasn’t Sunny on the other end. Cliff told Paula that they had stopped at the Prairie Flower Casino in Carter Lake, Iowa. He had gone inside to gamble, but because Sunny was under 21, she had to stay in the car. Cliff said that when he came out of the casino three hours later, Sunny was gone. He drove around for a while to look for her, but eventually he gave up and left the city. Cliff refused to answer Paula’s questions and quickly hung up the phone, ignoring her attempts to call back. When he finally did respond the next morning, he told Paula a completely different story. He said that he had gone inside a convenience store to pay for gas, and when he returned to the car, Sunny was gone. But he couldn’t remember which gas station it was, and he wouldn’t give Paula any more information.
Paula reported Sunny missing, and the Hitchcock County Sheriff’s Office opened an investigation. They soon discovered that Cliff Coates had a lengthy criminal record, and his changing stories regarding Sunny were quite alarming. They learned that Coates had been heavily involved in a drug trafficking ring that funneled methamphetamine across state lines. The weekend he and Sunny embarked on their road trip to Omaha, Coates had actually been planning a drug run to Kansas City, Missouri.
For the next five years, investigators worked with federal agents to build a case against Coates. In April of 2024, Floyd Clifford Coates, Jr. was indicted on weapons charges dating back to a 2019 search of his property. He and his brother-in-law, Dennis Lawson, were also charged with tampering with evidence and physically intimidating another person.
During an 11-day federal trial in November of 2025, multiple witnesses testified that Coates told them Sunny had overdosed on methamphetamine. A woman who was part of Coates’ trafficking ring told the jury that she had seen Sunny’s motionless body in the backseat of Coates’ vehicle. The woman had driven Coates to Lawson’s house near the banks of the Mississippi River. Coates and Lawson had disappeared for a while, and when they returned, Sunny’s body was gone. Coates threatened the woman into helping him clean the car and told her not to tell anyone what she had seen. Coates told other witnesses that he had thrown Sunny’s body into the river.
On November 25, 2025, the federal jury found Coates and Lawson guilty of the charges against them. Coates faces a possible life sentence, while Lawson faces 20 years. Both men will remain in US Marshal custody until their sentencing.
In a statement, United States Attorney Leif Olson said, “Sunny Sramek went missing more than six years ago. But the investigators’ dedication kept her case from going cold. Thanks to them, these two criminals now face judgment for Sunny’s disappearance. Those who believe they can escape justice through threats, cover-ups, or the passage of time will discover they are mistaken.”
The next case I’d like to talk about is that of Angela Marisol Diaz, which I covered in episode 140. In July of 2024, 22-year-old Angela, who sometimes went by Marisol, went missing in Houston, Texas. After not hearing from her in several days, Angela’s family reported her missing to the Houston PD.
Angela’s boyfriend Krystephor Brown told the family that he had last seen her on Sunday, June 30th, when he had dropped her off at the Moonlight Inn & Suites on Gulf Freeway around 11:30pm. According to him, Angela had been planning to meet up with a man named Justin Scarbrough. When confronted by Angela’s family, Scarbrough claimed he had dropped her off on Telephone Road, just a few miles from the Moonlight Inn.
Angela’s phone activity showed that it had pinged in a wooded area behind a strip mall on East Freeway, nearly 30 miles from the Moonlight Inn on the other side of Houston. At 5:21am, the phone pinged a few miles west in Greater Fifth Ward before turning off. This didn’t line up with either man’s story.
Four months after Angela disappeared, the Houston PD transferred her case to their human trafficking unit. They had been tracking Angela’s movements prior to her disappearance and had even detained her during an undercover operation in early June. Angela had been engaging in sex work, and she had named Krystephor Brown as the one who was arranging and controlling all of her appointments. Shortly after she allowed police to search her phone, implicating Krystephor in a larger trafficking ring, Angela disappeared.
In November of 2024, the Houston Police Department announced an arrest warrant for Krystephor Karvon Brown on charges of promotion of prostitution. In spite of his criminal history, he avoided jail time by posting a $50,000 bond. As of this recording, his case is still moving through the Harris County court system.
On March 21, 2025, human remains were discovered in a wooded area near NASA’s Johnson Space Center. DNA testing confirmed that the remains belonged to Angela Marisol Diaz. She was found just 15 miles away from where she had disappeared.
One year later, on March 11, 2026, police announced that Justin Scarbrough, the man last seen with Angela, had been arrested and charged with her murder. He was also charged with tampering with a human corpse. Investigators believe that Scarbrough had arranged to meet up with Angela for sex, then murdered her and disposed of her body in the woods. He is currently being held in the Harris County Jail awaiting his arraignment on April 22.
Angela’s sister Sorangely told KHOU that the family was grateful to have some resolution in the case. “We had been following him since the beginning, asking him questions. We knew it was him… Now he’s getting charged in my sister’s case, finally. It’s nice to finally have someone like him off the streets.”
The next case I’d like to look at is that of Cecilia Bravo Cabrera, whose story I covered in episode 066. In the early morning hours of June 9, 2016, California State Highway Patrol discovered a vehicle on fire near the small town of Traver. They quickly learned that the car was registered to 30-year-old Cecilia Cabrera, but when they tried to contact her, they discovered that her family hadn’t seen her since the night before.
Cecilia, a mother of four, had recently left her second husband, Francisco – a toxic relationship that had turned into a contentious separation. But according to Cecilia’s family, the pair had decided to meet up on the night of June 8th to celebrate Cecilia’s upcoming birthday at the Tachi Palace Casino. Security cameras inside the casino captured Cecilia and Francisco leaving together at 12:39am on June 9th. Cecilia’s abandoned car was found just a few hours later.
During their investigation, detectives with the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office uncovered a complicated web of lies surrounding Cecilia’s relationship with Francisco.
In 2007, while living in Mexico, Francisco had married a woman named Rosalina. Shortly after that, the couple moved to the United States without the proper documentation. In 2008, Francisco met Cecilia and started a relationship with her, all the while still married to Rosalina. Investigators believed Francisco married Cecilia in order to obtain legal residency in the United States.
According to the Tulare County sheriff, there was an abundance of evidence that Francisco and Rosalina had worked together to make Cecilia disappear. In the weeks leading up to her disappearance, Cecilia had received threatening phone calls, and she had confided in friends that she was afraid of Francisco – she wanted to leave him for good, but he wouldn’t let her go. On the morning Cecilia disappeared, Francisco called Rosalina around 3am and asked her to pick him up by a bridge in Traver, saying that some friends had dropped him off and he needed a ride home. At 4:13am, his phone’s GPS placed him less than a mile away from where Cecilia’s car was found a short while later.
On December 13, 2016, the Tulare County Sheriff’s Department arrested Francisco Valdivia on suspicion of murder. They had also arrested his wife, Rosalina Lopez, and charged her with accessory to murder.
After years of delays, Rosalina Lopez finally appeared in court in December of 2020. She pleaded no contest to being an accessory after the fact and agreed to testify against Francisco in exchange for probation. In July of 2025, Francisco Valdivia was found guilty of first degree murder and arson of property. Five months later, a Tulare County judge sentenced him to life in prison.
As of this recording, Cecilia’s remains have not yet been found. If you have any information about Cecilia’s case, please contact the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office at 599-733-6218.
The final case I’d like to talk about is that of Ellen Rae Greenberg, which I covered in episode 104. Her story was recently detailed in the Hulu docuseries Death in Apartment 603, which brought renewed interest in the case.
On January 26, 2011, Philadelphia schools closed early in anticipation of a big winter storm. Ellen, a first grade teacher, left school around 1:30 and headed to the apartment she shared with her fiance Sam.
Around 4:45pm, Sam told Ellen he was going to the gym located in their apartment complex. But when he returned 45 minutes later, he found the door to the apartment locked. He had his key, but the swing bar lock was activated from the inside, preventing him from getting the door open. He called out to Ellen through the door, but she didn’t respond. For twenty minutes, he texted Ellen and called repeatedly, hoping she would hear the notifications.
According to Sam, he finally ended up kicking in the apartment door. When he did, he saw Ellen lying on her back on the kitchen floor, her head resting against the cabinet. She was covered in blood. Sam called 911 and told the dispatcher that there was a knife sticking out of Ellen’s chest. When paramedics arrived, Ellen Greenberg was pronounced dead at the scene.
When investigators arrived at the apartment, their first instinct was that this was the scene of a suicide. Ellen had been alone in the apartment with the door locked from the inside, and there was no sign of a break-in. There weren’t any cameras in the sixth-floor hallway, but security footage from the lobby didn’t show any unusual persons in the building that evening. And Ellen didn’t have any obvious defensive wounds on her body. The knife matched a set found in the kitchen, and there wasn’t any blood anywhere else in the apartment.
An autopsy revealed that Ellen had been stabbed twenty times. There were eight stab wounds in her chest, including the final, 4-inch-deep wound where the knife was found. She had a stab wound in her stomach and a long gash across the back of her scalp. Ten stab wounds were found on the back of her neck, two of which penetrated her spinal cord and brain. The medical examiner also noticed eleven bruises along the right side of her body from her leg up to her arm. At the end of the autopsy, he concluded that the manner of death was homicide.
However, detectives strongly believed that Ellen’s mental health struggles combined with the fact that she had no defensive wounds and she was found inside a locked apartment clearly indicated that she had taken her own life. They convinced the medical examiner to change his ruling from homicide to suicide. The case was officially closed.
Ellen’s parents, Josh and Sandee Greenberg, fully believed that their daughter had not died by suicide, but that she had been murdered. Unfortunately, because investigators had treated the original crime scene like a suicide, much of the evidence was already gone. The apartment had been professionally cleaned, and many of Sam and Ellen’s belongings had been removed by friends and family. But the Greenbergs weren’t giving up. They hired their own experts and private investigators to help them get Ellen’s case reopened.
For years, Ellen’s case went back and forth. In 2018, the Pennsylvania State Attorney General’s Office agreed to look into the case, but in April of 2019, they upheld the ruling of the medical examiner, and Ellen’s case was closed again.
The Greenbergs filed a lawsuit against the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, claiming that the original ruling of homicide was correct and asking for it to be changed back to homicide or to undetermined so that the investigation could continue.
In February of 2025, as a part of a settlement, the city of Philadelphia agreed that the current medical examiner would reopen Ellen’s case and look at all the evidence. Around that same time, Dr. Marlon Osbourne, the original medical examiner who conducted Ellen’s autopsy in 2011, announced that based on new information, he no longer believes that Ellen died by suicide.
However, in October of 2025, the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office issued their official ruling, declaring that Ellen Greenberg had indeed died by suicide. In the report, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Lindsey Simon stated that Ellen’s struggle with anxiety and recent changes in medication, combined with the lack of evidence of a third party being in the apartment at the time of her death, all led her to conclude that Ellen’s death had been a suicide. With that ruling, the city of Pennsylvania officially closed Ellen’s case.
In the aftermath, Ellen’s parents have vowed to continue fighting for their daughter. Sandee Greenberg told Nightline that they just want to know the truth. “I don’t know what our future options are, but we are not going away and we’re not giving up. So just because there was a period at the end of the sentence does not mean we forgot about our daughter. We love her very much.”