(WWJ) — The murder trial for the cousin of missing Eastpointe teen Zion Foster is underway.
A day after a jury was seated in Wayne County Circuit Court, opening statements were delivered Tuesday morning in the trial of Jaylin Brazier.
Brazier, 25, is charged with second-degree murder and tampering with evidence in connection to the presumed death of his cousin. Foster was 17 years old when she was last seen by her mother on Jan. 4, 2022.
Brazier told investigators at the time that the two had smoked marijuana together and after she died, he put her body in a dumpster, according to police.
Despite an extensive months-long search by police at a landfill in Lenox Township in the summer of 2022, Foster’s body has never been found. After serving a jail term for lying to police, Brazier was charged in August 2023.
During his opening statement Tuesday, Prosecutor Ryan Elsey told the jury Brazier deleted digital evidence from the night Foster was last seen.
“Two days after he put Zion Foster’s body into a dumpster, and one day after he told the police he had no idea where she was, he did something called a factory reset on his phone. It’s a complete wipe of the phone,” Elsey said. “So just as her body vanished, he made all of the digital evidence of the last night of her life vanish with her.”
He also described the parking lot where Brazier allegedly put Foster’s body, saying he “dumped her like a piece of garbage.”
“That parking lot is pretty much empty, except for one distinctive characteristic — it has several large dumpsters in it. Dumpsters large enough to fit human remains and you will in fact hear that the defendant ultimately confessed that he put Zion’s body into one of those dumpsters that night,” Elsey said.
But defense attorney Brian Brown called the case one of “fear and bad decisions,” noting Brazier and Foster were “favorite cousins.”
“Jaylin told the police after some time that she had shallow breathing and a faint heartbeat. He checked her to see if she was alive and she was dead. He did fear (that) because he was doing drugs — which is still federally illegal — that he could be blamed for something and he panicked,” Brown said Tuesday.
Brown said had Foster’s body been found in the landfill search — dubbed “Operation Justice for Zion” — an autopsy would have confirmed what Brazier told police.
Brown also claimed Tuesday that Foster had a history of seizures, but her mother, Cierra Milton, was the first witness to testify and she said that her daughter did not have seizures, but rather it was her now-three-year-old child who suffers from them.
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